
Book * G^ 

GoKTight^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



INDUSTRY 
AND HUMAN WELFARE 



THE SOCIAL WELFARE LIBRARY 
Edited by Edward T. Devine, Ph.D., LL.D. 

A series of volumes for the general reader and the 
social worker, designed to contribute to the under- 
standing of social problems, and to stimulate critical 
and constructive thinking about social work. 

i. Social Work: by Edward T. Devine. Price 
$3-00. 

2. The Story of Social Work in America: by- 

Lillian Brandt. In preparation. 

3. Community Organization: by Joseph Kin- 

mont Hart. Price $2.50 net. 

4. Industry and Human Welfare: by William 

L. Chenery. 

5. Treatment of the Offender : by Winthrop D. 

Lane. In preparation. 



THE SOCIAL WELFARE LIBRARY 

INDUSTRY 
AND HUMAN WELFARE 



BY 

WILLIAM L. CHENERY 

INDUSTRIAL EDITOR, "THE SURVEY" 
EDITORIAL WRITER, "THE NEW YORK GLOBE" 



iQeto gorfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1922 

All rights reserved 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



\\\^ 



w 



Copyright, 1922, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and printed. Published February, 1922, 



Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company 

New York, U. S. A. 



JAN 25 1922 
©GI.A654371 



To 

IDA BURNLEY CHENERY, 

My Mother, 

WHO, ALOOF FROM THE LARGER MANI- 
FESTATIONS OF INDUSTRY, HAS EVER 
BEEN ALIVE TO THE RANG- 
ING IMPLICATIONS OF 
HUMAN WELFARE 



INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR 

The Social Welfare Library is notably enriched by 
the present volume on Industry and Human Welfare. 
Its author is a specialist, but he has not written for 
specialists. He is a journalist, but this is not, strictly 
speaking, an attempt to "popularize" a technical sub- 
ject. It is intended for that already large and increasing 
number of citizens who are concerned that industry 
shall be productive and not destructive ; that it shall pro- 
mote the general welfare, without injury to workers; 
that the work of the nation shall be done by the natural 
and legitimate workers, not by children or invalids, and 
each part of it by those physically and mentally qual- 
ified for it. 

This Library is designed for those who are interested 
in promoting the conditions which favor a happy and 
useful life for all people. Among the most important 
conditions are those which affect income. Knowledge 
of the effect of industry itself on the worker and his 
family, his wages, his hours of labor, the regularity 
of employment and the hazards of industry, is there- 
fore fundamental. The public official, the church vis- 
itor, the private citizen interested in family welfare 
or in child welfare, has to understand what has hap- 
pened as a result of the industrial changes of the past 
century if he is to get the elementary satisfaction to 
which he is entitled from his efforts. At the present 

vii 



viii Introduction by the Editor 

moment the effect of industry upon the individual — 
with which this little volume especially deals — is of 
paramount interest and importance. 

Like the text-book on Social Work by the Editor of 
this Library, and Professor Hart's Community Organ- 
ization, the two volumes which have preceded it, the 
present volume is intended as a contribution to an 
understanding of the social problems in a particular 
field, and of their relation to the human welfare in 
general and to consciously directed social progress. 

Edward T. Devtne 
September, 1921. 



INTRODUCTION 



The inspiration of this small book has been a desire 
to ascertain and to state the major effects of the rise 
of the factory system upon the welfare of the Amer- 
ican people. To achieve such a result adequately calls 
for time and resources far beyond those at any com- 
mand. I am conscious of the hazards of undertaking 
to do briefly during the all too rare leisure hours and 
days at the disposal of a working newspaper writer 
a task worthy of the undivided attention of a group 
of scholars. Perhaps, however, the very brevity of 
this work will suggest to others the desirability of por- 
traying the scenes and the changes upon a truly gen- 
erous canvas. 

I have endeavored first to describe the condition of 
the American people during those years when factories 
were but prophecies. In doing this I have been actuated 
by the belief that it would be difficult to understand 
the results of the factory system until the way of 
life of those who came before the industrial revolu- 
tion had been envisaged. In piecing together this pic- 
ture of the condition of the people at the beginning of 
the nineteenth century I have utilized the researches 
of many students. Where references would seem to 
serve the purposes of readers I have in footnotes indi- 
cated my authorities. The sources used have been both 
primary and secondary. Chief reliance has been placed 



x Introduction 

in the historic governmental reports and in the mono- 
graphs of various students. But I have been at all 
times aware of the heavy obligation which all workers 
in this field owe to such men as Professor John R. 
Commons, John B. McMaster, William B. Weeden, 
Victor S. Clark, and others whose researches are now 
the classics of American industrial history. 

As I have followed this study I have been driven 
irresistibly to the conclusion that the well being of the 
people of this country lies within their own choosing. 
Throughout the history of the nation social control has 
been exercised through the national and state govern- 
ments. Industry has been directed in accordance with 
the purposes of those who happened to be dominant at 
the time. Laissez-faireism has been a doctrine useful 
to the owners and managers of industry. It has seldom 
been appealed to as an argument to defeat the wishes 
of those who possessed property and political priv- 
ileges. It has been chiefly a rein upon legislation de- 
signed to alleviate the condition of the poor. This has 
not been wholly a conscious process. The advocates of 
economic anarchy, which is an uncharitable translation 
of the French phrase laissez-faire, have seldom been 
aware that they were practicing social control in behalf 
of the owners of factories while they preached industrial 
drift to workers. But for all the unconsciousness 
of the development the record is not the less convinc- 
ing. 

In making this study many inviting by-paths have 
been crossed. American industrial history is richly sug- 
gestive. Un worked fields are many. One of the most 
promising is a study of the hazards which working 



Introduction xi 

people historically have encountered. A fruitful chap- 
ter of such a work would recount the fortunes of the 
debtor prisoners. The change from a system of im- 
prisonment for debt to public insurance against the 
hazards of industry measures a social revolution. Of 
necessity this matter had to be excluded from detailed 
consideration. Other questions of equal and even of 
greater importance have had to be pushed aside. 
Among the most tempting of these is the problem of 
the migration of people which has followed the prog- 
ress of factories. The population of the country has 
been redistributed by industrial need. An agricultural 
people has been moved to towns and cities. A wide 
range of issues has been created by the shift. Con- 
gestion, transportation, housing, recreation, community 
organization are some of the unanswered questions 
occasioned by the movement of people from the country 
to the city in response to factory demand. Considera- 
tion of these matters would, however, lead too far afield 
from the proper limits of this book. So, too, the allur- 
ing questions of industrial control have been avoided. 
These are germane to the central problem of stating the 
consequences of the rise of the factory system upon 
human welfare. The question of space has again been 
imperative. A brief volume cannot infringe upon the 
prerogatives of an encyclopedia. Industrial govern- 
ment with all its related problems, so charged with sig- 
nificance for the future of society, has accordingly been 
avoided. 

I wish here to acknowledge my obligation to Miss 
Mary Van Kleeck, director of industrial studies of the 
Russell Sage Foundation, John A. Fitch of the New 



xii Introduction 

York School for Social Work, Professor William E. 
Dodd of the University of Chicago, and Miss Lilian 
Brandt, all of whom generously read my manuscript 
and who saved my book from slips which it would 
otherwise have carried. I do not wish, however, to 
suggest that any of these friends bears any responsi- 
bility for the opinions herein expressed. Finally I 
would express my appreciation to the editor of this 
series, Edward T. Devine; and to Paul U. Kellogg, 
editor of the Survey, for that generous treatment of 
an associate's time without which this work could not 
have been performed. 

William L, Chenery 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Introduction vii 

CHAPTER 

I The Pioneer Nation i 

II The Rise of Industry ..... 24 

III The Worker's Family 44 

IV Wages in Industry yy 

V Hours 95 

VI Regularity of Employment . . . 114 

VII The Hazards of Industry . . . . 134 

VIII The Status of Workers . . . . 145 



INDUSTRY AND HUMAN 
WELFARE 

CHAPTER I 

THE PIONEER NATION 

The history of industry in America calls to mind 
Goethe's ironic saying : "Whatever one desires in youth 
one has in age in abundance." For to a remarkable 
extent the growth of mechanical production in the 
United States has fulfilled the desires of some of the 
founders of this republic. Responsive to a request 
from the House of Representatives in 1791, Alex- 
ander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury wrote a 
brilliant argument in behalf of the development of 
manufacturing. He set forth advantages which the 
United States might get from manufactures. As a 
nation we have attained much of what Hamilton fore- 
saw. Some of the benefits forecast became the serious 
social evils which in subsequent generations threatened 
the health of the republic. Only too adequately did 
the mature nation reach the goals of its youth. The 
aspirations of the fathers fulfilled in the lives of the 
children created conditions which now call for states- 



2 Industry and Human Welfare 

manship not less alert and vigorous than that of the 
original great advocate of American industry. 

In Hamilton's judgment the independence and pros- 
perity of the new republic would be furthered by the 
national protection and stimulation of a variegated 
industry. The steam engine had not then become a 
practical tool and only the new inventions in use in 
the English textile mills had begun to make clear the 
outlines of modern industry. But Hamilton saw lucid- 
ly the enormous potentialities of manufacturing. He 
was eager to persuade the feeble federal government 
to nurture industry and mechanical invention. He was 
willing to do this at a time when even the most popu- 
lous and influential states were still predominantly 
agricultural. 

The effectiveness with which Hamilton's policies 
were put into practice by his countrymen became the 
admiration and wonder of later travelers from 
Europe. The United States built rapidly according to 
the plans designed by the first Secretary of the Treas- 
ury. The thing which the great protagonist of indus- 
try and his immediate successors did not see, however, 
was that the social organization and the political prin- 
ciples which were adapted to handicraft industry and 
to agriculture might prove grievously inadequate in that 
complex, impersonal, industrial society whose attrac- 
tions he set forth with logic and with eloquence. Ham- 
ilton sought to change the method of production, but he 
was not aware that mechanical industry involved the 
creation of entirely new human relationships. Conse- 
quently, while he pleaded for the nurture and for the 
protection of industries which then had hardly been 



The Pioneer Nation 3 

conceived, he did not know that the people of the 
country also required protection against the devastat- 
ing influences of the new order. Because he did not 
know this, because generations passed before America 
became conscious of it, because even to-day the full 
reality is not commonly accepted, the industrial prob- 
lem exists. 

"The expediency of encouraging manufactures in the 
United States, which was not long since deemed very 
questionable, appears at this time (1791) to be pretty 
generally admitted," Hamilton was able to say. He 
pointed out what now seems almost too obvious for 
utterance, namely, that the employment of machinery 
forms an item of great importance in the general mass 
of the national industry, and then he turned to some 
of the details of the progress he proposed. The fol- 
lowing paragraphs show the line of his reasoning as 
plainly as they foretell some of the evils which even 
to-day are unconquered : 

"The cotton mill, invented in England within the last 
twenty years, is a signal illustration of the general propo- 
sition which has just been advanced. In consequence of 
it, all the different processes of spinning cotton are per- 
formed by means of machines, which are put in motion 
by water and attended chiefly by women and children; 
and by a smaller number of persons, in the whole, than 
are requisite in the ordinary mode of spinning. And it 
is an advantage of great moment that the operations of 
this mill may continue with convenience during the night 
as well as during the day. The prodigious effect of such 
a machine is easily conceived. To this invention is to be 
attributed, essentially, the immense progress which has 
been so suddenly made in Great Britain in the various 
fabrics of cotton. 

"This is not least valuable of the means by which 
manufacturing institutions contribute to augment the 
general stock of industry and production. In places where 



4 Industry and Human Welfare 

those institutions prevail, besides the persons regularly- 
engaged in them, they afford occasional and extra em- 
ployment to industrious individuals and to families, who 
are willing to devote the leisure resulting from the inter- 
missions of their ordinary pursuits to collateral labors, 
as a resource for multiplying their acquisitions or their 
enjoyments. The husbandman himself experiences a new 
source of profit and support from the increased industry 
of his wife and daughters, invited and stimulated by the 
demands of the neighboring manufactories. 

"Besides this advantage of occasional employment to 
classes having different occupations, there is another, of 
a nature allied to it, and of a similar tendency. This is 
the employment of persons who would be otherwise idle, 
and in many cases a burthen on the community, either 
from the bias of temper, habit, infirmity of body or some 
other cause, indisposing or disqualifying them from the 
toils of the country. It is worthy of particular remark, 
that, in general, women and children are rendered more 
useful, and the latter more early useful, by manufacturing 
establishments than they would otherwise be. Of the 
number of persons employed in the cotton manufactories 
of Great Britain, it is computed that four-sevenths nearly 
are women and children; of whom the greater propor- 
tion are children and many of them of a tender age."* 

This line of argument was touched again when Ham- 
ilton was urging the development of the iron indus- 
try. Thus he said: 

"The United States already in great measure supply 
themselves with nails and spikes. . . . The first and most 
laborious occupation in this manufacture is performed 
by watermills; and of the persons afterwards employed, 
a great proportion are boys, whose early habits of in- 
dustry are of importance to the community, to the 
present support of their families, and to their own future 
comfort." 

These conditions deemed so desirable by the great 
constructive statesman of American industry and fin- 
ance have been in part the evils against which subse- 

* Works of Alexander Hamilton, Volume 3, Manufactures, page 
207 and following. 



The Pioneer Nation 5 

quent generations have waged increasing warfare. 
Hamilton, in fact, advocated industry as a means of 
creating the circumstances which as soon as manufac- 
turing was firmly entrenched were recognized as peril- 
ous to the national well-being. He reckoned among 
the advantages of industry the list of what the present 
day regards as wrongs. Child labor, employment of 
women and children at night, the regarding of manu- 
facturing employment as a source of supplementary 
income rather than as the basis of living for those 
employed by it, continuous industry, — these are a vital 
part of the social problem created by the development 
of manufactures. Nevertheless, they are precisely 
what Hamilton advocated. Only too well in these 
respects has the republic fulfilled the ambitions of its 
youth. 

The essential advantage which Hamilton sought was 
the labor-saving utility of machinery. To save labor 
has in fact been the one and persistent object of indus- 
trial invention everywhere. The intensity of the early 
American desire for labor-saving methods of produc- 
tion is attributed to the partially occupied condition of 
the land and to the temptation of a superlative abun- 
dance of unexploited natural resources. Every man 
saw riches in sight if he could obtain labor. To under- 
stand plainly the salient effects of industry upon human 
welfare it is therefore needful to take this fact into 
consideration. It was a determining national motive. 
To comprehend the effects the new industry engendered 
in the United States, it is also necessary to recall to 
mind the state of the American people during the 
years immediately preceding the establishment of the 



6 Industry and Human Welfare 

factory system. Unless in fact the work and life of 
the people for whose well-being Hamilton and others 
urged the fostering of manufactures are pictured it 
is difficult to see in perspective what have been the con- 
sequences of industry for human welfare in this 
country. 

One hundred and twenty-five years ago the factory 
system had hardly been conceived in the United States. 
To-day we are the greatest manufacturing nation. At 
the dawn of the nineteenth century the United States 
was a sparsely settled strip bounded by the Atlantic 
and by the Appalachian ranges, a pioneer country sup- 
ported chiefly by agriculture. The century which ended 
with the outbreak of the World War saw the rise and 
maturing of the factory system under a government 
which through the Monroe Doctrine claimed primacy 
over two continents. Within the space of those few 
generations the isolated colonial settlements of Napo- 
leon's time had become the continental citadel of 
strength to which the Great Powers turned for aid in 
time of need. In this cosmic drama the rise of the 
factory system in America has played a notable role. 
Worshippers of power and of magnificence may find 
indeed an altar for their prayers and their thanksgiv- 
ing in industrial America. The multiplication of 
riches, the development of luxury, and the growth of 
might, attributable to machine manufacture, are the 
familiar products of our industrial revolution. But 
what has happened to the individual American by reason 
of these vast changes? How has industry affected 
human welfare? Is life happier and more carefree 
for the majority of men and women and children in 



The Pioneer Nation 7 

this land because of the new industry? Is the day of 
the skilled artizan more filled with satisfaction? And 
how has the common laborer fared ? How, again, have 
women and children of the working classes been af- 
fected? Is work under the factory system a better 
regime for them? Does life offer more to them than 
their great-great-grandparents secured? What are the 
outstanding changes in human welfare occasioned by 
the rise of mechanical industry? 

During the years between the end of the American 
revolution and the beginning of the era of railroad 
transportation in 1830, factories took firm root in the 
United States. The necessities of the colonists, sud- 
denly cut off by the war of independence from the 
customary English supplies, caused men of Alexander 
Hamilton's outlook to realize the need for the estab- 
lishment of manufactures in the new nation. The ex- 
perience of the country during the War of 18 12 em- 
phasized the lesson. Many considerations — local, 
sectional, national, and international — tended to rein- 
force the arguments made in behalf of mechanical 
industry. In an amazingly short time the United States 
from Massachusetts to Baltimore became an industrial 
nation. The first cotton factory was established in 
Rhode Island in 1790 by Samuel Slater. The rapid 
development came after 181 5, and by 1830 the new in- 
dustrial order was entrenched.* What then was the 
state of the American people during the first decades of 
the nineteenth century? In particular, what was the 
condition of the working classes ? 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the 
* Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1885, page 162. 



8 Industry and Human Welfare 

people of the United States, it has been observed, 
neither believed nor practiced their political professions 
of human equality. Politically the United States was 
a government of, by, and for the property holders. A 
man could not vote in most states unless he owned 
property, and in many states unless he complied with 
certain religious tests. A woman could never vote 
save by an oversight, as in New Jersey, where a hast- 
ily drafted constitution had neglected to exclude 
women. Citizenship in the colonies was like mem- 
bership in a corporation. The possession of stock or 
property was a prerequisite to voting and to holding 
office. The ownership of fifty acres of farm land or 
of equivalent property was the customary test. Prop- 
erty voted; men did not. Taxation without represen- 
tation, was the revolutionary war cry. The political 
revolution which preceded the change in our industrial 
system tended, it is true, to eliminate the property 
qualifications for the suffrage. But it was not until 
the eighteen-twenties that the greatest battles were 
fought for manhood suffrage. As late as 1837 the 
attitude of property holders toward the extension of 
the ballot was expressed as follows in the Pennsylvania 
Constitutional Convention : 



"But, Sir, what does this delegate propose?" said a 
defender of franchises for the upper classes. "To place 
the vicious vagrant, the wandering Arabs, the Tartar 
hordes of our large cities on a level with the virtuous 
and good man? . . . These Arabs, steeped in crime and 
vice, to be placed on a level with the industrious popu- 
lation is insulting and degrading to the community. . . . 
I hold up my hands against a proceeding which confers 
on the idle, vicious, degraded vagabond a right at the 



The Pioneer Nation g 

expense of the poor and industrious portion of this 
commonwealth." * 

The right was merely that of suffrage, and the men 
termed Tartar hordes steeped in vice and crime were 
only those whose property was insufficient to qualify 
them for the ballot. Political power throughout the 
United States, during the years when the present in- 
dustrial system was being created, was exercised by 
a minority of property owners. How small that 
minority was may be estimated from the vote on the 
constitutional convention in Massachusetts — a conven- 
tion called to extend the franchise. In that state only 
men who owned real estate which brought in an income 
of three pounds annually, or who had other property 
to the extent of sixty pounds, were permitted to par- 
ticipate in elections. In 1820 the population of Mas- 
sachusetts was 523,287. There were 142,588 free 
white males over sixteen years of age.f Only 18,349 
men voted on the question of holding a constitutional 
convention. J The men who could not vote, who 
had no real share in the determination of public affairs, 
were vastly more numerous than the voters. 

In the New England Magazine of January, 1890, 
Dr. J. F. Jameson reported his computations of the 
early voting in Massachusetts and elsewhere. He says : 

"Taking all the excluded together, we may venture to 
bring our own figure down to 16 or 17 per cent, and may 
conclude that in round numbers about one-sixth of the 

* Penn. Con., 1837 : Debates 2, 487. Quoted in "Suffrage in the 
United States," by Kirk H. Porter, University of Chicago Press, 
1918. 

t United States Census, 1820. 

t Niles* Weekly Register. 



io Industry and Human Welfare 

population of old Massachusetts, or say 55,000 men, 
50,000 of them in Massachusetts and 5,000 in Maine, were 
entitled to vote in 1776. . . . About 16 per cent of the 
inhabitants could vote if they chose. How many of them 
did so? . . . The number of those who actually did vote 
in those ten years (1780-1789, inclusive) amounted to 
just about three per cent." * 

The property and other qualifications for voting in 
Massachusetts were near enough like conditions in the 
other states to give a fair picture of the degree of polit- 
ical self-government exercised by the American people 
in the decades prior to the development of mechanical 
industry. 

The qualifications for holding office, furthermore, 
were stricter than those for voting. In spite of the 
assertion of state constitutions that all men are born 
equally free and independent and that therefore all 
just government originates from the people and is in- 
stituted for the general good, the holding of office was 
in practice of, by, and for privileged property holders. 
McMaster well says: "The poor man counted for 
nothing. He was governed, but not with his consent, 
by his property-owning Christian neighbors. He was 
one of the people, but he did not count as such in the 
apportionment of representation. In short, the broad 
doctrine that governments derived their just powers 
from the consent of the governed was not accepted 
by the 'Fathers.' The most they were ready to admit 
was that all governments derive their just powers from 
the consent of the taxpayer."! This condition had 
an enormous influence on the development of industry 
in this country. 

* No change for some decades. 

t "Rights of Man in America/' Cleveland, Ohio, 1893, page 21. 



The Pioneer Nation n 

Political power was utilized to direct the growth 
of manufacturing industry and that power was wielded 
strictly in the interest of the property-holding group 
who had historically possessed the franchise. "L'etat, 
c'est moi" was, and to a considerable extent still is, 
the emblem of American property owners, just as truly 
as it was the startled expression of an indiscreet French 
king. 

Industrially the population was predominantly rural 
and agricultural. As late as 1820 less than five per 
cent of the American people lived in cities of 8,000 
population and over.* In 1790 there were but five 
cities in the United States having a population of 
8,000. Their combined population was less than 
100,000, forming only 2.4 per cent of the population 
of the country. The great majority of Americans, 
perhaps 95 per cent, were countrymen at the time that 
the foundations of the industrial system were laid. 
A majority now live in the cities. Farmers were of 
many classes. The richest were masters of principali- 
ties. They were aristocrats whose lives and whose 
views were fashioned upon European ideals. The 
republican court which President Washington himself 
maintained at Philadelphia satisfied the punctilious re- 
quirements of visiting French nobility. From the 
estates of gentlemen who sought to develop in this 
country an old world social order the holdings of 
farmers varied in size and value to the poor clearing 
of the pioneer. Manufacturing was a home industry 
carried on chiefly by farmers and their wives and chil- 

* "A Century of Population Growth in the United States Gov- 
ernment," Census Bureau, Washington, 1909, page 14. 



12 Industry and Human Welfare 

dren and servants, and by wandering mechanics. The 
artizan was sometimes a freeman and often an inden- 
tured servant or a slave. Yet his was the ingenuity 
which invented many of the technical processes upon 
which the factory system was later built. 

Skilled workers in Maryland and southward were 
largely slaves and indentured servants. In Penn- 
sylvania at the beginning of the nineteenth century it 
has been estimated that one-half of the artizans were 
redemptioners, so-called. The redemptioner was the 
immigrant who was bound to serve a term of years in 
payment for his passage overseas. During his servi- 
tude he or she could be sold from master to master 
after the manner of slaves. The indentured servant and 
his variant, the redemptioner, were always potentially 
free men and seem to have been counted as such in the 
first censuses. Yet while he served the bondsman's 
status was close to that of a slave. The system of 
servile labor was furthermore as old as the colonies. 
It had grown out of the apprentice system. From the 
very beginnings of Maryland and of Virginia men and 
women had been imported to do the work of the 
plantations. The capture and enslavement of Africans 
tended to supplant white servitude in the South but the 
system of indentured servants was continued well into 
the nineteenth century. Men and women willing to 
settle in the United States and lacking the price of the 
passage were induced to sign papers of indenture. The 
master of the ship or some merchant who had advanced 
the transportation expenses would dispose of these im- 
migrants on the arrival of the ship at Philadelphia or 
Baltimore, or at some other port. This trade was 



The Pioneer Nation 13 

carried on in full force until 181 7.* Isolated cases 
were mentioned as late as 1835. 

These white contract immigrant laborers were an 
important section of the productive population. Effec- 
tually the redemptionersf were slaves for a limited 
period of time. Englishmen, Irish, Scotch, and later 
Germans and Swiss, were all the material of the sys- 
tem. Curiously enough, too, most of the German re- 
demptioners were brought in after the War of In- 
dependence. In 181 7 three small sailing vessels left 
the Dutch port Helder with 1,100 redemptioners for 
New Orleans. During a passage of about four months 
503 perished. The survivors were sold to work out 
their passage. The number of years served by these 
immigrants in order to redeem their freedom varied. 
They might work only four years. But if they were 
indentured while children they might be compelled 
to serve until the twenty-second or the twenty- 
fourth year was passed. While still in bonds the in- 
dentured man or woman had few rights which the 
master was bound to respect. A redemptioner could 
not marry except with the permission of his owner. 
The bondsman could be arrested and imprisoned where- 
ever found if he traveled without a permit. He could 
be beaten cruelly by way of discipline. 

On March 21, 18 17, the following advertisement 
appeared in the Baltimore American, and it was re- 
peated daily until April 7: 



* "White Servitude in Maryland," by Eugene Irving McCormac, 
Johns Hopkins University Press. Page 109. 

t "History of the German Society of Maryland/' by Louis P. 
Hennighausen, Baltimore, Md., 1909. 



14 Industry and Human Welfare 

"German Redemptioners. 

"The Dutch ship 'Johanna/ Capt. H. H. Bleeker, has 
arrived before this city and now lies in the cove of 
Wiegman's Wharf; there are on board, desirous of 
binding themselves for their passage, the following single 
men: two capital blacksmiths, a rope maker, a carrier, 
a smart apothecary, a tailor, a good man to cook, several 
young men as waiters, etc. Among those with families 
are gardeners, weavers, a stone mason, a miller, a baker, 
a sugar baker, farmers and other professions." * 

Prior to the Revolutionary War the only skilled 
laborers in the province of Maryland had come as inden- 
tured servants from Ireland and England, f Light on 
the position in society of such mechanics is cast by 
such newspaper advertisements as the following, which 
appeared in The Maryland Gazette and Baltimore 
Advertiser of January 25, 1785: 

"Ran away from the subscriber, living on Monocacy, 
Carroll's Manor, in Frederick county, six miles from 
Frederick-Town, on the 27th of December last, an in- 
dented Irish servant-man known by the name of Patrick 
Quigley, a shoemaker by trade, of middling stature, well 
set, of ruddy complection, short black hair, about 5 feet 
2 or 3 inches high, 24 years of age; had on and took 
with him when he absented a felt hat half worn, short 
blue sailor's jacket, red waistcoat, pair of white cloth 
breeches, a pair of white and black speckled milled stock- 
ings, and a pair of old shoes with steel buckles. Who- 
ever takes up said servant and brings him to the sub- 
scriber or secures him in any jail so that his master may 
get him again shall have, if taken 20 miles from home, 
Twenty shillings ; if 30 miles, Thirty shillings ; if a far- 
ther distance, Three pounds, including what the law 
allows and reasonable charges if brought to Daniel 
Hardman, January 8, 1785." t 

So far reaching was this system that tradesmen, 

clerks, schoolmasters, and even ministers were adver- 

* Hennighausen, op. cit., page 59. 

t "White Servitude in Maryland," page 35- 

t Idem, page 51. 



The Pioneer Nation 15 

tised for sale. Ballagh relates that "Colonel William 
Preston of Smithville, Virginia, bought at Williams- 
burg about 1776 a gentleman named Palfrenan as a 
teacher for his family; he was a poet and a scholar, 
a correspondent and a friend of the celebrated Miss 
Carter, the poetess, and also of Dr. Samuel John- 



son 



» * 



The apprentice system of which the redemptioners 
were so signal an expression broke down, it is true, 
during the first decades of the nineteenth century. But 
the industrial revolution, the change from manual to 
mechanical production, came about while the ideas and 
customs of that servile economic system still lingered. 
Labor had still something of a slave status when New 
England and the Middle Atlantic States began to erect 
factories. 

Freedom and independent status came ultimately to 
these redemptioners because of the abundance of the 
land. After their periods of service had passed the 
majority set up establishments for themselves on the 
edge of the wilderness. Many of them founded well 
known families. Some of the signers of the Declara- 
tion of Independence were former bondsmen. The 
self-made men, so-called, were common in colonial 
days; and yet, even though every redemptioner was 
potentially a free man and a citizen, the gulf between 
the bond and the free was wide. 

Such was indentured labor. But beyond the bonds- 
men were the free artizans to the North and the Negro 

* "White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia," by James Curtis 
Ballagh, Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Sci- 
ence, 1895, page 83. 



1 6 Industry and Human Welfare 

slaves in the South. What was the status of the free 
artizan at the beginning of the nineteenth century? 
He was inconspicuous south of Mason and Dixon's 
line, and to the north as far as Pennsylvania he was 
in active competition with the redemptioner, who had 
what was for the period of his service a slave status. 
The artizan worked from sunrise to sunset. His wages 
were low. He was esteemed of little significance in the 
social scale. Nowhere is the position of the property- 
less working man in the early years of the republic 
described more vividly than in a debate in Congress 
over the pay of soldiers. The Annals of Congress, 
January 6, 1794, tell plainly what the "Fathers" 
thought of common folk. 

The House was debating the military bill. The 
United States paid its soldiers three dollars monthly. 
The bill proposed to raise this to four dollars. A mem- 
ber of the House offered an amendment which raised 
this figure to five. Then in truth Congress was agi- 
tated. The official reporter says: 

"Mr. Wadsworth did not see any reason for the pro- 
posed additional dollar per month. If he had thought 
it necessary he would have been very ready to mention 
it. In the States north of Pennsylvania, the wages of a 
common laborer were not, upon the whole, superior to 
those of a common soldier. . . . Mr. Boudinot said that 
he should be very sorry to recommend the augmentation, 
if he thought that it would induce farmers and sober, 
industrious folk to quit their families and professions in 
exchange for a military life. . . . America would be in 
a very bad situation, indeed, if an additional pay of twelve 
dollars a year could bribe a farmer or a manufacturer 
to enlist. . . . Originally troops had been raised for less 
than two dollars per month. The pay had been aug- 
mented to three, and was now on the way of being raised 
to four. He wished to make its advance gradual. . . . 
Mr. Smith said that, as to the rate of labor, good men 



The Pioneer Nation ij 

were hired to work in Vermont for eighteen pounds a 
year, which is equal to four dollars per month, and out 
of it they find their own clothes. He thought it a very 
dangerous plan to raise the wages of soldiers at this 
time, when every article was above its natural price; 
because, when things return to their old level, it would 
be impossible to reduce their wages. . . . The members 
of Congress had six dollars per day, and it would be no 
easy matter to alter that, which he seemed to hint might 
not be quite improper. He thought that high pay would 
only serve to make the soldiers get drunk." 

Mr. Smith's views seemed to find support, for in 
the end the amendment was rejected. This debate 
shows at least how the political representatives of the 
socially and economically privileged classes viewed 
ordinary workmen during the early years of this re- 
public. But the nation is not always as drab as a 
debate in Congress would indicate. The life of the 
skilled artizan in New England, at any rate, compared 
favorably with that of men of other classes. Mechan- 
ics were relatively few. In 1789 Dr. Franklin said of 
New England:* 

_ "Calculations carefully made do not raise the propor- 
tion of property or the number of men employed in 
manufactures, fisheries, navigation or trade to one-eighth 
of the property and people occupied by agriculture even 
in that commercial quarter." 

Most mechanics seem to have followed many voca- 
tions. The career of Thomas B. Hazard, "Nailer 
Tom/' as set forth in his diary f was apparently of 
wide and entertaining variety. The entries of a few 
months picture a way of living which socially is richer 
than the condition which the wage-earning or even 
the lower-salaried classes find to-day. Hazard was 

* Quoted in New England Magazine, January, 1890, page 487. 
t "Historical Narragansett," Volume 1, page 32, and following. 



1 8 Industry and Human Welfare 

brief but apparently accurate, and his mind was con- 
stantly taking note of what passed. As his nickname 
indicates, he was a nailmaker by trade, and yet, accord- 
ing to his own account, nailmaking seems to have 
been reserved for days and evenings when other labors 
were not pressing. Among the entries are such as 
these : 

"Making bridle bits, worked a garden, dug a wood- 
chuck out of a hole, made stone wall for cousin, planted 
corn, cleaned cellar, made hoe handle of bass wood, sold 
a kettle, brought Sister Tanner's goods in a fish boat, 
made hay, went for coal, made nails at night, went 
huckleberrying, raked oats, plowed turnip lot, went to 
monthly meeting and carried Sister Tanner behind me, 
bought a goose, went to see town, put on new shoes, 
made a shingle nail tool, helped George mend a spindle 
for the mill, went to harbor mouth a gunning, killed a 
Rover, hooped tubs, caught a weasel, made nails, made 
a weasel cage, opened the cow's hoof, split wood, made 
a shovel, went swimming, staid at home, made rudder 
irons, went an eeling." 

By his own account Hazard, who was a famous 
mechanic and whose skill was esteemed highly in his 
region, was thus a man of odd jobs. He was farmer, 
gardener, fisher, hunter, boatman, veterinarian, tool- 
maker, bridle-bitmaker, nailer, cooper, woodworker, 
boat builder, to cite only a few of the crafts which he 
followed. Mechanics of his skill and ingenuity were 
the type whose inventions made possible much of the 
success of the mechanical revolution in the United 
States. Such men often became the heads of manufac- 
turing establishments when later power machinery was 
set at work. Many of these men enriched themselves 
and became the founders of wealthy families. Free 
mechanics in New England were not citizens in a full 



The Pioneer Nation 19 

sense unless they had property, but they had a respect- 
able status and an interesting life during the early 
years of the republic. In attempting to estimate the 
major effects of the industrial revolution in the United 
States it is important to consider what has happened 
to the vocational descendants of "Nailer Tom." Some, 
of course, like Henry Ford, have found opportunities 
imperial in their scope, while others — with whose for- 
tunes this book has concern — have a very much less 
interesting life. Hazard's wages seem to have varied 
from $1.50 to $2 a day and upon occasion he took his 
pay in kind. Thus on December 2, 1778, he notes 
that his work at Oziel Wilkinson's has come to "three 
oxen which he has paid me." 

Women and children were constantly employed. 
For the most part they were engaged in the home or 
in the field, but they were none the less busy. The dis- 
cipline of hard work was esteemed the best educative 
influence for children. Where the apprentice system 
continued young children were bound out to learn their 
trades. Because of the predominance of agriculture 
in the colonies and because of the greater development 
of home manufactures the apprentice system was, how- 
ever, never so common in the United States as in En- 
gland. But the need for some variety of employment 
to take the place of apprenticeship was felt and so the 
Manufactory House, established in Boston not long 
before the Revolutionary War, was esteemed to be a 
school. William Molineux, a member of the society 
responsible for the building of the establishment, 
stated to the Massachusetts Legislature that he had 
"Learned at least 300 children and women to spin in 



20 Industry and Human Welfare 

the most compleat manner."* The first nine operatives 
engaged by Samuel Slater, the British mechanic whose 
experience made possible the establishment of the first 
cotton mill in the United States, were seven boys 
and two girls between the ages of seven and twelve 
years. Moses Brown, the cotton merchant, who before 
his venture with Samuel Slater had been engaged in 
supplying coarse cotton cloth to southern plantation 
owners for the use of their slaves, considered the em- 
ployment of children to result in "near a total saving 
of labor to the country.' ' 

The hours of labor in nearly all industries "were 
measured by the sun, from sunrise to sunset constitut- 
ing the working day." Although there were a few 
earlier flurries, not until 1824 was the subject of 
shorter hours seriously agitated, and not until the 
period of 1835 and 1840 were shorter hours adopted 
to any extent. f It was several years after that date be- 
fore ten hours became the rule in the mechanic trades, 
while in the textile industries the ten hour system is 
"a modern innovation," as yet adopted only in Massa- 
chusetts, so far as America is concerned, Carroll D. 
Wright, Chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statis- 
tics of Labor, reported in 1885. The hours of labor 
at the beginning of the industrial age were in fact 
those of agriculture. The textile mills at Lowell 
were the pride of New England during the early dec- 
ades of the nineteenth century, and yet it seemed en- 
tirely right and natural that little girls not over ten 

* "The History of Manufactures in the United States," by Vic- 
tor S. Clark, page 188. 
t "History of Labor in the United States," Vol. 1 : 393- 



The Pioneer Nation 21 

years of age should work fourteen and fifteen hours 
daily alongside their elders.* From five in the morn- 
ing until seven in the evening were the customary hours 
in the early mills, and even this was shorter than the 
working day in the country during the busy season. 
Doffer girls were paid two dollars a week at Lowell, 
but these wages were esteemed very high, so high 
that the daughters of professional men were drawn to 
the mills, just as during the World War the wages 
paid in munitions plants attracted classes of workers 
who ordinarily do not enter factory work. During the 
years after the American Revolution money was scarce 
and trade took the form of barter. Wages were paid 
in clothing, or groceries, or in orders for such com- 
modities. This system, afterwards known as the 
truck system, and still one of the lingering evils of 
outlying industrial establishments, was almost uni- 
versal at the beginning of the nineteenth century. "Of 
actual money the workingman had little," says the 
Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor,f and 
"when cash became absolutely necessary, they were 
often obliged to exchange store orders therefor at a 
considerable discount. Employers kept stores of gro- 
ceries, clothing, boots and shoes, and particularly 
liquor and tobacco, and it is evident from the inspec- 
tion of old account books that a liberal share of the 
wages of labor was paid in rum and gin." The almost 
universal result of this method of payment was that 



* "Early Factory Labor," by Mrs. Harriet H. Robinson, in 14th 
Annual Report, Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 
1883. 

t Annual Report, 1885. 



22 Industry and Human Welfare 

the workingman was continually in debt and effectually 
bound to his employment. 

Wages were certainly not high. In Massachusetts, 
for example, the same general level, with considerable 
minor variations, seems to have been maintained be- 
tween 1800 and 1 81 5. A laborer got from 35 cents 
to 75 cents a day or $13.33 a month. Carpenters were 
paid from 80 cents to a dollar a day. A shoemaker 
earned about $5.52 a week or 23.4 cents per pair of 
shoes when on piece work. A teacher was paid from 
$30 to $50 a month, while a painter got about 62 cents 
a day. A mason got as much as $1.66 a day. Boys 
employed in agriculture were rated at 16 2/3 cents a 
day in 1808. In 18 15 blacksmith horseshoers were 
paid 90 cents a day, or if they had board in part 
payment, 45 cents. The same year boat builders were 
paid at the rate of $1.13 daily or 50 cents with board. 
Clockmakers and coopers each had the rate of $1.13 
daily. Women employed as domestic servants re- 
ceived their board and 50 cents a week. Skilled foun- 
drymen earned $1.13 and their unskilled associates 
87^ cents daily. Harnessmakers were paid from 
45 cents to 88 cents a day, depending on whether or 
not they boarded themselves. Laborers that year 
varied from $8 a month with board to $1.50 daily, the 
high mark. Millwrights, machinists, and house paint- 
ers were paid $1.13 a day. Ship and sign painters, 
however, got $1.38. Tailors earned $3 a week with 
board, or $6 without. Printers were on the basis of 
$1.13 a day. Patternmakers had the same. Ship 
riggers got $1.25 and ship carvers $1.38.* 

* "Wages and Prices: 1752-1860." Sixteenth Annual Report, 
Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor. 



The Pioneer Nation 23 

The employment of women and children was uni- 
versal during the years prior to the establishment of 
the factory system in the United States. From the 
very beginnings of this country women and children 
had worked. That their toil was limited to the home 
and to agriculture and to domestic industry was mere- 
ly due to the fact that there were no other opportunities 
for employment. The belief current recently that the 
establishment of the industrial system drove women 
and children to work is without foundation. The 
mechanical revolution changed only the kind of work 
done. The fact of work itself was assumed. In any 
effort to recall the social and economic background of 
the industrial system in this country it is vital to re- 
member this. A farmer could hardly hope to live 
without the cooperative employment of his wife and 
children. 

The ideas which gained sanction during the centuries 
prior to the beginning of power production were car- 
ried over into the new era. 



CHAPTER II 

THE RISE OF INDUSTRY 

In such a world the foundations of modern industry 
were laid. Labor was essential but not in all grades 
dignified. Power in most of the states was in the 
hands of a selective few. The possession or acquisi- 
tion of property was the common test of fitness of 
the resident to become the active citizen. Government 
was the expression of the will of property holders. 
Slaves, indentured servants, women, men without suf- 
ficient holdings and income to vote, had no voice in the 
framing of public policies or the making of laws. Gov- 
ernment, the expression of the will of property hold- 
ers, was therefore naturally utilized to nurture, protect 
and develop manufacturing industries as new sources 
of wealth to individuals as well as to the state. 

Prior to the Revolutionary War the power of the 
British government had been used to retard the devel- 
opment of manufacturing industries in the American 
colonies. After the Revolutionary War the federal 
government and, to an extent, the states, used their 
powers to build up an American manufacturing sys- 
tem. Without interruption, from 1789 to the present, 
the government has fostered manufacturing industry. 
Chiefly by tariffs and patent laws, in part by embar- 
goes, and to a lesser extent by bounties and other spe- 

24 



The Rise of Industry 25 

cial advantages, manufactures have been consistently 
aided. These facts, familiar enough, throw light on 
the doctrine, long prevalent and still powerful in this 
country, that the state must not interfere with the 
management of industry. What is meant, of course, 
is that the government, state or national, must not in- 
tervene in order to safeguard the health and well-being 
of wage-workers in industry, or of consumers. For 
few of those who resent so-called government inter- 
ference in behalf of either workers or consumers object 
in the slightest to governmental activity in the inter- 
est of the owners and managers of industry. On the 
contrary, such support has been courted from the very 
earliest days. Laissez-faireism, the hands-off policy, 
in its American version, was developed not to fend off 
the friendly offices of governments from infant indus- 
tries, but to prevent those governments from exerting 
themselves in the interest of consumers and workers 
when the infant industries had grown great. 

In every way which the builders of this republic 
could conceive the government has been led to nurture 
manufactures. Mechanical industry was from the out- 
set seen to be a national enterprise of boundless im- 
portance to the United States. The experiences of the 
Revolutionary War, of the War of 181 2, and also of 
the intervening period between those struggles, induced 
statesmen to take public measures to aid in the creation 
of manufacturing establishments. Although at first 
the seafaring interests of New England and the plant- 
ing interests of the South opposed national aid to 
manufactures, to advocate protection for private in- 
dustry was not during the early decades to be politi- 



26 Industry and Human Welfare 

cally partizan. Despite their differing politics Albert 
Gallatin and Alexander Hamilton were both zealous 
friends of American mechanical industry. Tench Coxe 
and Thomas Jefferson were friends and correspond- 
ents.* 

States as well as the federal government exerted 
themselves. Thus in his address to the New York 
Senate on January 29, 181 1, Governor Daniel D. 
Tompkins expressed a common view when he observed 
that "The astonishing progress which has been made 
in the improvement and extension of domestic manu- 
factures was a source of lively satisfaction. . . . " ; and 
when he added, "Let us extend to them (i. e., manufac- 
tures) the utmost encouragement and protection which 
our finances will admit." The encouragement and pro- 
tection afforded by the states were practical. The gen- 
eral court of Massachusetts, for example, directed that 
the sum of two hundred pounds be paid out to Robert 
and Alexander Barr, "to enable them to complete cer- 
tain machines for carding, roping, and spinning cotton 
and sheep's wool." The machines which these artizan- 
inventors devised were put on exhibition for the bene- 
fit of all who desired to see them.f Thomas Somers 
was given twenty pounds by the general court of Mas- 
sachusetts in order to enable him to build certain mach- 
ines for the carding, spinning and roping of cotton 
wool. Somers had learned how to construct the ma- 
chines while in England. Many other incidents of this 
nature were recorded. The states, as well as certain 

♦"Memoir of Samuel Slater," by George S. White, Phila- 
delphia, 1836. 
t Op. cit. f page 295. 



The Rise of Industry 27 

cities and private organizations, were willing to expend 
public money to stimulate the development of manu- 
factures. That policy has its contemporary parallel in 
the aid given by chambers of commerce to new manu- 
facturing enterprises in some communities, and in a 
larger way to the aid given war industries by the 
national government during the struggle with Ger- 
many, and more recently in the loans accorded the rail- 
roads. While this form of state aid may not have in- 
fluenced the subsequent development of manufactures 
in any important way,* it at least recorded the atti- 
tude of public authority toward interfering with in- 
dustry. 

Perhaps the most potent influence of state legisla- 
tion upon the development of industry, however, is to 
be found in the liberal incorporation laws. The earl- 
iest corporations chartered by the states were gener- 
ally semi-philanthropic, and some of them received 
gifts of public land. But far more important than such 
donations was the building up of the legal fiction that 
the corporation was a person. The specific powers 
granted to groups of individuals and the limited lia- 
bility which each individual thus incurred gave to the 
corporation an enormous opportunity for development. 
It may well be that not otherwise could manufacturing 
industries have been so rapidly rooted in this country, 
but it is nevertheless true that the form of incorpora- 
tion devised in the United States has had a lasting in- 
fluence upon the varying prosperity of the men and 
women and children who fill the ranks of industry. 

* "History of Manufactures in the United States, 1607-1860," 
page 265. 



28 Industry and Human Welfare 

The need for protecting industry and commerce was 
in truth one of the determining motives which led to 
the consolidation of the thirteen independent states. 
Alexander Hamilton said that the suggestion of giving 
Congress the power to make uniform regulations for 
commerce in all the states was first made at a conven- 
tion held at Hartford.* A committee was appointed 
by Congress in 1784 to consider the matter. Jefferson, 
Gerry, and three others were members of the commit- 
tee. It recommended "to the legislatures of the sev- 
eral states, to vest the United States in Congress as- 
sembled, for the term of fifteen years, with a power 
to prohibit any goods, wares or merchandise from 
being imported into any of the states, except in vessels 
belonging to and navigated by citizens of the United 
States or the subjects of foreign powers with whom 
the United States have treaties of commerce." f Indi- 
vidual states did enact tariff and non-importation laws. 
Among these were Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and 
Massachusetts. J Immediately after the end of the 
Revolutionary War an extensive importation of manu- 
factured products from Great Britain was begun. 
Among the effects of this movement were the stimula- 
tion of luxury and the draining of coin from the 
country. Merchants and mechanics suffered especially, 
and the papers were filled with complaints even from 
farmers. The merchants, mechanics and tradesmen 
of Baltimore, New York, and Boston, as early as 1789, 

* Hamilton's Works, 2 : 26 : "Early Stages of the United States 
Tariff Policy," by William Hill. Publications of the American 
Economic Association, 1893, page 95. 

t Journals of Congress, 9 : 185. 

$ Hill, op. cit., page 145 and following. 



The Rise of Industry 29 

began to petition Congress for relief from the compe- 
tition of foreign imports. The New York committee 
appeared to the first Congress on April 18, 1789, say- 
ing in part, "Wearied by their fruitless exertions your 
petitioners have long looked forward with anxiety for 
the establishment of a government which would have 
power to check the growing evil (i. e., the importation 
of foreign goods) and extend a protecting hand to the 
interests of commerce and the arts. Such a govern- 
ment is now established. On the promulgation of the 
constitution now just commencing its operations, your 
petitioners discovered in its principles the remedy they 
had so long and so earnestly desired." The mechanics 
and manufacturers then added a list of articles which 
they said could be profitably made in New York pro- 
vided the general government gave them the protection 
sought in their petition.* When the Constitution had 
actually been adopted, among the first acts of Congress 
was the passage of the tariff law of 1789. Although 
the purpose of this was in part to raise revenue, by 
its very terms it proclaimed the protective principle. 

The Annals of Congress f show how generally ac- 
cepted was this principle of protection. Representa- 
tives of every state which had industries desired tariff 
barriers against foreign competition, but at the same 
time many sought the free importation of the raw ma- 
terials used in their own industries. James Madison, 
who introduced the original bill, sought only five per 
cent duties for revenue although he readily accepted 
the protection principle. Fitzsimmons of Pennsylvania 

♦American State Papers: Finance, Vol. 1, page 9. 
1 1 : pp. 173-174. 



30 Industry and Human Welfare 

introduced a substitute bill and stated clearly the pur- 
pose in the following words : 

"The tax is meant not only for revenue but as a regu- 
lation of commerce, highly advantageous to the United 
States. . . . The legislature of Pennsylvania granted aid 
by discriminating in the manner proposed and with like 
aid from the government of the United States, the mer- 
chants may no longer fear the machinations of the 
opulent companies of Europe."* 

There was not the slightest tinge of laissez-faireism 
in the doctrines preached by the early Pennsylvania 
representatives to the Congress of the fathers. Nor 
was there any hesitancy on the part of the Congress 
of 1789 to grant the protection desired by the early 
merchants and manufacturers who were at that time 
chiefly mechanics dependent on the favor of the better 
established merchant class. Even rum was protected. 
Massachusetts demanded this, while Madison argued 
that an industry so pernicious needed no protection. 
Madison was defeated, f William Maclay, senator 
from Pennsylvania, records in his notes the course of 
the debate in the Senate : 

"I set out with naming over the greater part of the 
articles on which the protective duties of Pennsylvania 
were twelve and one-half and thirteen per cent in New 
York. I reasoned from the effect of these duties on the 
promoting the manufactures. But by the present law the 
manufacturers would stand on worse ground by five per 
cent than they had done under state laws ; and although 
the United States were not absolutely obligated to make 
good the engagements of states to individuals, yet as 
the individuals had embarked their property in these 
manufactures, depending on state laws, I thought it 
wrong to violate those laws without absolute necessity." % 

* Annals 1 : 141. 

t Ibid. I: 173. 

$ Sketches of Debates, page 68, quoted by Hill. 



The Rise of Industry 31 

Protection was thus evidently deemed a sound prin- 
ciple by the lawmakers of 1789. Laissez-faireism cer- 
tainly did not then arise to denounce government inter- 
ference with industry or commerce. 

The practical differences of opinion as to protection 
were mainly those of degree. Free traders, so-called, 
were content with low duties, while protectionists 
have demanded higher ones. There have, however, 
been divergencies of desire as to the interests to be 
protected. The New England commercial and marine 
groups were for a long time opposed to the national 
development of manufactures. But their opposition 
was grounded on their belief that the government 
should not aid their rival interest.* The tradition of 
the eighteenth century sanctioned the closest relation- 
ship between governments and industry. Alexander 
Hamilton in his statement to Congress listed eleven 
different methods of fostering industry "which have 
been employed with success in other countries" : pro- 
tecting duties, embargoes on importation, embargoes 
on exportation of raw materials to rival nations, pe- 
cuniary bounties, premiums, exemption of raw mater- 
ials from duty, drawbacks of the duties which are 
imposed on the materials of manufactures, encourage- 
ment of new inventions, judicious regulations for the 
inspection of manufactured commodities, the facili- 
tating of pecuniary remittances from place to place and 
the facilitating of the transportation of commodities. 
Most of these methods have at one time and another 
been used either by the states severally or by the United 

* "The Tariff History of the United States," by F. W. Taussig, 
page 70. 



32 Industry and Human Welfare 

States. Often enough the action taken has been jus- 
tified. The point is that the interference and assist- 
ance of the government have been consistently sought 
by those concerned with building up private business. 
This unbroken custom is of the utmost significance 
in reckoning the influence of mechanical industry 
upon the welfare of the American people. 

It is enlightening from this point of view to recall 
briefly the trend of argument on the tariff contro- 
versy. From 1789 until the present that issue has 
never been long dormant in this country. The vary- 
ing positions taken with reference to it, moreover, in- 
dicate with definiteness the changing condition of the 
people. In following the early discussions it is neces- 
sary to keep in mind some of the customary and, at 
the time, unchallenged, assumptions of the founders of 
American industry. First of all, as has been indicated 
by the statements of Alexander Hamilton and Tench 
Coxe, the labor of women and children was taken to 
be a part of the natural order. Again, mechanical 
power, it was thought, would so lighten labor that 
women and children could easily bear the burden of 
manufactures. Finally, the early American industrial- 
ists, in contrast with the English factory owners, were 
very much concerned about the shortage of labor. In 
England, in spite of the Napoleonic wars, there was an 
undoubted surplus of workers both in the rural dis- 
tricts and in the towns.* In the United States the 
open lands of the West were constantly attracting set- 
tlers from the older states. This set up a competition 
between the agricultural interests of the West and 
the industrial interests of the East, a competition which 

* "The Village Laborer," by J. L. and Barbara Hammond. 



The Rise of Industry 33 

had a long and important influence on the development 
of the nation. Because of the relative ease with which 
the adventurous laborer might become a pioneer 
farmer, wages of labor in Eastern manufactories were 
fixed by the level of Western agricultural earnings. 
Of necessity they had to be high enough to prevent 
too ready migrations if the labor force were to be stabil- 
ized. As compared with the wages paid in England 
the earnings of mechanics and laborers were high in 
the United States during the first decades of the nation, 
because of the abundance of unsettled land. 

The problem which the advocates of the establish- 
ment of American industry confronted was accord- 
ingly the discovery of a method of meeting the compe- 
tition of British manufacturers who employed cheap 
labor and at the same time of preventing migrations 
westward. British competition was as serious after 
the War of 181 2 as it had been at the conclusion of 
the Revolutionary War. American industrialists 
turned to the tariff. Then developed one of the most 
interesting phenomena in American industrial history 
— the labor argument in the veering tariff discussion. 
Hamilton, with characteristic perspicacity, had seen 
previously that the difficulty of high wages could in 
part be remedied by stimulating immigration as well 
as by the use of women and children. "We shall," 
said he, "in a great measure trade upon foreign stock, 
reserving our own for the cultivation of our lands 
and the manning of our ships, as far as character and 
circumstances shall incline.* Stimulated immigration 

*Page 34, Taussig reprint, State Papers and Speeches on 
the Tariff. 



34 Industry and Human Welfare 

since the very beginnings of industry, as a matter of 
record, has tended to lower what have ever been called 
the high wages of American workers, but the fact of 
this continuous recruiting for the industrial armies, 
with its tendency to lower wages, strangely enough 
has been ignored when tariff protection was being 
sought for industry. The high wages of American 
workers were, furthermore, from the first, frankly 
regarded as disadvantageous. Protectionists urged the 
wage scale as an additional reason for levying high 
duties on imports. The motive in the early decades 
at any rate was not to make possible the continuance 
of high wages but to compensate American employers 
for the wages which they were compelled to pay. 

The great tariff discussion which followed the War 
of 1 8 12 occurred before manhood suffrage had been 
widely established. There was accordingly no polit- 
ical pressure to induce members of the government 
to act in the interest of laborers. During the tariff 
campaign the labor argument in behalf of the tariff 
took two distinct forms. The tariff was urged because 
of the unemployment due to the shut-down of certain 
mills, and it was also advocated in order to compen- 
sate employers for the high wages which were reputed 
to be paid. "The increasing unemployment following 
the year 1816 and culminating in the great crisis of 
1819-20 gave a powerful impulse to our tariff policy 
and popularized protection in many parts of the union," 
says Mangold.* Mathew Carey, who was one of the 
first Americans to attempt to attract public attention 
to the condition of the poor, was an active advocate 

* "Labor Argument in the Protective Tariff," page 29. 



The Rise of Industry 35 

of protective tariffs. After 1831 eastern manufac- 
turers opposed liberal land laws in order to prevent 
the migration westward and at the same time de- 
manded duties on imports which would enable them to 
pay the wages demanded by laborers who might other- 
wise go west. After 1830 — about the time when labor- 
ers and other propertyless men began to vote — the labor 
argument of the tariff advocates changed in character. 
Less was said about compensating employers for the 
high wages they felt impelled to pay. The unemploy- 
ment argument, the assertion that the imposition of 
import duties would stimulate employment, was re- 
newed. At the same time it was argued that the pro- 
tective system itself tends to make high wages.* This 
was a complete change of front. This argument cul- 
minated in the theory that tariffs were to be laid in 
order to protect the American workingman from the 
pauper labor of Europe. 

In connection with the elaboration of the labor 
argument for protective tariffs it is relevant to remem- 
ber that an immigration policy designed to overcome 
any benefits which laboring men and women might 
have, in fact obtained, from the imposition of tariffs 
was being steadily applied. That policy was the stimu- 
lation of immigration. It was an entirely natural ex- 
pression. There was an actual shortage of workers 
in the United States. Unsettled lands did invite human 
energy. From Hamilton onward the leaders of the 
rising industrial interests strove to increase immigra- 
tion just as strenuously as they sought to have a tariff 
wall built to save them from the competition of 

* Op. cit., page 70, 



36 Industry and Human Welfare 

Europe. They were full of zest in keeping out the 
products made by the pauper laborers of Europe, and 
they were equally enthusiastic in facilitating the im- 
portation of these pauper laborers themselves. The 
reason was in part assuredly to be found in their belief 
that immigration would tend to reduce wages to a 
more satisfactory level. John Pickering * said in 
1847: 

"If the working classes will promote the 'protective 
system,' their first object should be to prevent the impor- 
tation of foreign 'pauper operatives'; it will then be 
time enough to think about preventing the importation 
of the goods they make; till then it would be perfectly 
useless." 

The labor argument in the tariff was an interesting 
concession to the times. The principle of protection 
itself, a principle which has been applied in varying 
degrees but without interruption from the very birth 
of the republic until the present, reveals clearly the 
attitude of the state toward industry and of industry 
toward the state. Consistently throughout the history 
of this nation the owners and projectors of industry 
have desired public aid and their desire has ordinarily 
been fulfilled. To a great extent this has been true also 
of transportation. The record of municipal, county, 
state, and national aid to railroad building is a litera- 
ture in itself. It reaches far beyond the proper con- 
fines of this study. None the less, it shows as lucidly 
as does the history of the tariffs how willing public 
authority was to cooperate in construction of the means 
of transportation as an aid to agriculture, commerce 

*"The Working Man's Political Economy," page 150; quoted 
by Mangold, page 101. 



The Rise of Industry 37 

and industry, and how welcome was such cooperation 
so long as it was directed to the assistance of the priv- 
ate possessors of the property. 

Since the cooperation between statesmen and the 
promoters of industry has been historically so close 
it is important to examine the purposes and the social 
ideals of those who were the founders of the American 
manufactures. What has been the historic purpose 
of statesmanship in this respect, and what were the 
ideals of those formative years? How has the sub- 
sequent development of industry been influenced by 
those ideals? First of all, American leaders from the 
very outset have believed that farmers were the back- 
bone of the nation. Even Hamilton regarded manu- 
factures as a supplementary source of wealth. "It 
ought readily to be conceded," he wrote,* "that the 
cultivation of the earth as the primary and most cer- 
tain source of national supply; as the immediate and 
chief source of subsistence to man; as the principal 
source of those materials which constitute the nutri- 
ment of other kinds of labor ; as including a state most 
favorable to the freedom and independence of the 
human mind — one, perhaps, most conducive to the 
multiplication of the human species; has intrinsically 
a strong claim to preeminence over every other kind 
of industry." 

The permanence of that sentiment in American life 
was curiously exhibited when the Senate Committee 
investigating campaign funds in 1920 examined certain 
industrial leaders. The witnesses naively expressed the 
opinions that farmers, especially Middle Western 
* American State Papers, Finance 1, 123. 



38 Industry and Human Welfare 

farmers, were the best Americans. The tradition of 
that belief runs as an unbroken strand through the 
texture of American development. It has had far- 
reaching results. One of the first of these was the 
principle accepted by Hamilton, Tench Coxe, Gallatin, 
and others, that manufactures were subsidiary. The 
labor employed was to be that of women and child- 
ren, immigrants, and the sons of farmers during the 
frozen winter. "The husbandman himself," said Ham- 
ilton, "experiences a new source of profit and support 
from the increased industry of his wife and daughters, 
invited and stimulated by the demands of the neigh- 
boring manufactories.' ' Women and children, par- 
ticularly those of a tender age, were to be recruited. 
Immigration, attracted by manufactures, would in 
Hamilton's words be "an important resource, not only 
for extending the population, and with it the useful 
and productive labor of the country, but likewise for 
the prosecution of manufactures, without deducting 
from the number of hands which might otherwise be 
drawn to tillage; and even for the indemnification of 
agriculture for such as might happen to be diverted 
from it." The importance of this belief that industry 
was to be treated as a subsidiary enterprise in the 
national economy developed later. Inadequate wages, 
long hours, unwholesome working conditions, devas- 
tated family life, bad housing, periodic unemployment, 
were in part made immune from public interference by 
this belief that agriculture was the main business and 
industry the supplementary avocation of American 
workers. 

The belief that manufactures were subsidiary to 



The Rise of Industry 39 

farming had also the effect of imposing the agricul- 
tural system of labor in the factories. The hours of 
labor were from sun to sun in agriculture. It was ac- 
cordingly entirely natural to establish the summer 
routine of the farms in the cotton mills. Mrs. Harriet 
H. Robinson, one of the young women who worked 
at Lowell when the factory system was getting estab- 
lished in this country, recorded her memories in a paper 
published in 1883 by the Massachusetts Bureau of Sta- 
tistics of Labor. Lowell was the model factory town 
of early America, and yet little girls not over ten years 
of age there worked fourteen and fifteen hours daily. 
"The working hours of all the girls extended from five 

o'clock in the morning until seven in the evening, with 
one-half hour each for breakfast and dinner. Even the 
doffers (the youngest children) were forced to be on 
duty nearly fourteen hours a day," said Mrs. Robin- 
son. On occasion the working day was lengthened 
until eight, nine or ten o'clock at night and sometimes 

it began at four in the morning. The factory girls 
came from New England farms. They returned ordin- 
arily to their country homes where similar hours pre- 
vailed. It was not extraordinary, therefore, that the 
farmers' working habits should have been adopted by 
early industry. 

Another ideal which was taken over bodily was the 
conception of personal relationship between employer 
and employes. That ideal still persists in many places. 
It was valid in the eighteenth century. The apprentice 
system was never elaborated in this country as it was 
in England and in Europe generally, but none the less 
the tradition of the relation between apprentice and 



40 Industry and Human Welfare 

master was strong. The colonial manufacturer was the 
mechanic or artizan who had gathered about him a few 
journeymen and a few apprentices. The first factories 
were spinning rooms. These establishments were de- 
signed to utilize the energies of petty offenders or to 
instruct children in the textile arts. The remaining 
records of apprentices always portray relationships 
which were intimate and personal even though they 
were not always pleasant and just. Following the ex- 
ample of Arkwright and Strutt in England, whom he 
had served as an apprentice, Samuel Slater, the founder 
of cotton manufactures in the United States, estab- 
lished Sabbath schools for the moral instruction of his 
employes. The rules and regulations in the Lowell 
factories are suggestive of the regime of girls' board- 
ing schools of the time. Board and lodging and cloth- 
ing were the pay of the apprentice who was content 
to work because of the instruction he obtained. Simi- 
larly the first factory workers were given their board 
and lodging by many employers. 

Long hours of labor and the employment of women 
and children were accepted because of the general be- 
lief in the virtuous discipline of steady toil. Yet the 
establishment of manufactures was sought also because 
of the labor-saving potentiality of machinery. A 
sparsely settled country needed the application of labor. 
Mechanical industry promised to save labor. The 
advocate of manufactures accordingly delighted to 
calculate the savings which would result from the use 
of machinery. In contrast with hand processes the 
burden of watching the machine seemed light. Of 
the number employed in the British cotton industries 



The Rise of Industry 41 

Hamilton noted that four-sevenths were women and 
children, that the greater portion of these were chil- 
dren, and that the majority of the children were of a 
tender age. The textile machines seemed so great a 
liberator of mankind from the curse of toil that only 
the strength of infants was thought to be required 
to perform the work of men and women. That idea 
was carried on. In 1 810 Albert Gallatin, the brilliant 
Secretary of the Treasury, again reported to Congress 
on the state of American manufactures. At that time he 
was compelled still to report that by far the greater 
part of goods made of cotton, flax and wool in the 
United States "are manufactured in private families, 
mostly for their own use and partly for sale." Tench 
Coxe, the most active advocate for the establishment 
of manufactures in the United States, calculated in 
1 8 14 that 58,000 operatives could spin the entire 
amount of cotton then exported from the United 
States. With machinery Coxe reckoned that only one- 
eighth of this working force need be adult males,* the 
remaining seven-eighths women and children. One 
hundred thousand women working on a half -day 
schedule could weave this cotton. It could be printed 
by about 60,000 men and children. The labor of 
210,000 persons, chiefly women and children, could by 
the subtlety of machines increase the value of this ex- 
port cotton from eight or nine million dollars to sev- 
enty-five million dollars. Coxe reported that the dim- 
inution of manual labor in Great Britain by means of 
machinery in the cotton business was estimated at 200 
to 1 in 1808. He, pioneer leader that he was, with the 
* American State Papers, Finance 2, 669. 



42 Industry and Human Welfare 

enthusiasm of a crusader in advocating industry, 
described "wonderful machines working as if they were 
animated beings, endowed with all the talents of their 
inventors, laboring with organs that never tire and sub- 
ject to no expense of food or bed or raiment or dwel- 
ling," which "may justly be considered as equivalent 
to an immense body of manufacturing recruits, enlisted 
in the service of the country." It was estimated that 
a hand-wheel spinner could produce about four skeins a 
day in 1800. In 181 5 a mule spinner could attend to 
about 90 spindles, which produced daily 180 skeins. 
Twenty years later each mule spinner watched 200 
spindles, each of which turned out as many as eight and 
one-half skeins daily.* 

Fundamental to the entire movement which sought 
the governmental nurture of industry was finally an 
admirable desire to enable the American people to fab- 
ricate comforts and luxuries for themselves and ren- 
der the nation self-sustaining. Simple men as well 
as the great leaders whose names have become historic 
united in this enterprise. Among the group of Boston 
merchants who petitioned Congress for protection on 
June 5, 1789, were spokesmen of wheelwrights, black- 
smiths, rope-makers, hatters, pewter ers, soap-boilers 
and tallow-chandlers, wool cardmakers, ship carvers, 
sail-makers, cabinet makers, coach makers, tailors, 
cordwainers, glue and starch makers, brass founders 
and coppersmiths. These men had the vision of nation 
builders. They lived at a time when a new and revo- 
lutionary era in human history was unfolding and they 

* "History of Manufactures in the United States," page 432. 
House Doc. 146, 24 Congress, I Session, page 52. 



The Rise of Industry 43 

desired ardently to see the great forces which invention 
promised set to work in the service of their country. 
Political traditions they had broken. Social stratifica- 
tion they were beginning to challenge. In the midst 
of these two revolutions, political and social, came the 
prospect of even deeper changes in the productive life 
of the new nation. The power which the new industry 
proffered early Americans eagerly sought and attained. 
The consequences which followed, the manner in which 
human welfare was affected by the machine era, must 
now be considered. 



CHAPTER III 

THE WORKER'S FAMILY 

The avowed purpose of Congress in stimulating the 
development of manufactures was to add to the 
national prosperity. Variegated industry, it was 
thought, would render the country independent of 
foreign nations for military and other essential sup- 
plies. At the same time, through the division of labor 
and the use of mechanical power, the total sum of 
national wealth would be vastly increased. The fore- 
casts of the early advocates of manufactures have been 
abundantly fulfilled in this respect. By many tests 
an enormous multiplication of national wealth and 
productivity has been shown. Tench Coxe in 1812 
estimated the value of all the manufactures of the 
United States at $172,762,676.* In 1919 the value of 
American manufactured products was placed at more 
than sixty-two billions, f Within that 107 years the 
value of the products of American industrial estab- 
lishments had thus been increased approximately three 
hundred and sixty fold, while the population had in- 
creased sixteen fold. The value of manufactures had 
accordingly been augmented more than twenty times 
as rapidly as had the population. None of the bold 

* "Digest of Manufactures/' page 676. 

t "Census of Manufactures," Press Release, May 24, 1921. 

44 



The Worker's Family 45 

promoters of a century ago dared dream of such a 
growth. The actual material achievement of American 
industry has surpassed enormously the wildest hopes 
of the forefathers. 

How has this great augmentation of national pro- 
duction, and how, in particular, have the various in- 
dustries through which this new wealth is produced, 
affected the working class family? It has been cus- 
tomary, first of all, to accuse manufacturing industry 
of having broken down the worker's home by taking 
women and children out of it. The charge is only in 
part justified. Women and children worked * long 
before the steam engine was invented although work in 
the home was very different from the later service in 
factories. In fact it has been said that during the 
seventeenth century English women provided clothes 
and food for the family while the men supplied shel- 
ter. Every member of the American artizan or farmer 
family was busily employed. A farmer complaining 
of the extravagance and waste of the times wrote a 
letter which was published in the Connecticut Courant 
of August 18, 1788. He was born poor and became 
rich. In recounting the vicissitudes of his own life 
he painted a picture which has been considered typical 
of the age and region. He recalled: 

"My parents were poor and they put me at twelve 
years of age to a farmer with whom I lived until I was 
twenty-one. My master fitted me off with two suits of 
homespun, four woolen shirts and two pair of shoes. 
At twenty-two I married me a wife, and a very good 
young woman she was. We took a farm of forty acres 
on rent. By industry we got ahead fast. I married my 

* "Women in Industry," by Edith Abbott. 



46 Industry and Human Welfare 

eldest daughter to a clever lad to whom I gave one 
hundred acres of my out land. This daughter had been 
a working, dutiful girl, and therefore I fitted her out 
well and to her mind: for I told her to take the best 
of my wool and flax and to spin herself gowns, coats, 
stockings and shifts — nay, I suffered her to buy some 
cotton and to make into sheets as I was determined to 
do well by her. At this time my farm gave me and my 
whole family a good living on the produce of it and left 
me one year with another one hundred and fifty silver 
dollars, for I never spent more than ten dollars a year 
which was for salt, nails and the like. Nothing to wear, 
eat or drink was purchased as my farm provided all- — 
with this saving I put my money to interest, bought 
cattle, fatted and sold them and made great profit." 

Prosperity led this particular family into what the 
farmer deemed luxury and also into extravagance and 
debt, whither it is unnecessary to follow them. The 
system of work in which all participated, even the very 
young children, was, however, well nigh universal 
throughout New England and the Middle Atlantic 
States. All were expected to work. Industry was, 
in fact, the only school open to the great majority of 
the population. It was universally deemed to be the 
best influence in the formation of character. Boys 
and girls for the good of their souls, as well as for 
the profit of their parents, were put to work almost as 
soon as they passed the frontier of infancy. Little girls 
of six and seven and younger began the tasks — theirs 
for life — of spinning wool and flax and cotton.* A 
Massachusetts law of 1642 provided that children who 
tended cattle "be set to some other employment withal, 
as spinning upon the rock, knitting, weaving tape, etc." 
Portable hand looms were taken into the pastures by 
the boys and girls in order that their small hands might 

*"The Family as a Social and Educational Institution," by 
Willystine Goodsell, page 401, 



The Worker's Family 47 

be kept busy. Boys wove garters and suspenders on 
tape looms while girls assisted in the gardens. Both 
boys and girls were apprenticed, although the appren- 
tice system was never so common in the colonies as it 
was in England. A "Spinning School House" was 
established in Boston in 1720 for the purpose of teach- 
ing the art to children of the poor. Some masters 
seem to have regarded apprenticed children lightly, as 
may be gleaned from the following advertisement 
which appeared in the Connecticut Courant : 

"Run away from the subscriber on the evening of the 
thirteenth of this instant July, an apprentice boy about 
17 years old and about five feet high : said boy did belong 
to New Haven, named Elisha Turner. Who will take up 
said boy and return him to his master shall have two 
pence reward and no charges paid by 

Samuel Clark, 
Winchester, July 28, 1788." 

Under the system of domestic industry practically 
all textiles were spun and woven by women and chil- 
dren. Historically spinning and weaving and the mak- 
ing of clothes were duties which women, their 
children, and their servants, where servants were 
available, had generally performed. The first factories 
thus were competitors of the family manufacturers. 
When Tench Coxe prepared the Digest of Manufac- 
tures for 1 810 * home production was seen to exceed 
the output in manufacturing establishments enor- 
mously. For every yard of cotton made in a factory 
upwards of 112 yards were fabricated by families in 
1 8 10. Wool showed similar conditions. More than 
nine and a half million yards were woven in families, 
* American State Papers : Finance 2 : 690 and following. 



48 Industry and Human Welfare 

while only some seventy-one thousand yards were 
turned out by the twenty-three woolen factories re- 
ported in the 1810 census. The disproportion was 
overwhelming. It was entirely to be expected, there- 
fore, that the ambitious promoters of manufactures 
should have accepted industrial conditions as they 
found them. Women and children had been employed 
in the fabrication of cloths. The invention of power 
looms, the utilization of water power first and later 
of steam, appeared to render far more facile the work 
they had traditionally performed. Machinery seemed 
at first sight to make things very easy of accomplish- 
ment — to lighten their historic burden and not to im- 
pose new duties. The textile factories were, moreover, 
the pioneer manufactures. The conditions which 
obtained in them, conditions sanctioned by immemorial 
usage in domestic life, were extended generally into 
industry. As factories grew in number and importance 
women and children left the home for new industrial 
duties. 

Work in factories was not, however, like that of 
homes. This was clearly seen by a few in England, 
and Americans who advocated the establishment of 
manufactures had to defend the project against 
charges that such work was demoralizing. Tench 
Coxe took up the imputation and in reply said :* 

"Opinions have been advanced in some countries un- 
favorable to the morals of the manufacturers. But it 
does not appear that there is more vice among the 
description of persons indicated in the preceding para- 
graph than in some other extensive classes of our popu- 
lation. . . . The system adopted at Humphreysville, in 

* "Digest of Manufactures," page 689. 



The Worker's Family 49 

Connecticut, with respect to education, manners, disci- 
pline, morals and religion, is an interesting evidence that 
the people of the United States may quicken and increase 
the virtues of the rising generation, and reform the 
degenerate of later years by a humane and politic system 
in the large manufactories. It may correctly be observed 
that while no commotions have dishonored the reputation 
of manufacturers in this country, from this class of our 
citizens there have arisen Nathaniel Greene, Benjamin 
Franklin, and David Rittenhouse, respectfully conceived 
to be comparable without disadvantage to their respective 
memories and to their manufacturing brethren with any 
equal number of ornaments and benefactors to their 
country of any other single profession or occupation. 
The field of manufacturers, represented in other parts 
of the world, to be fruitful in mischief and turbulence, 
has produced here a body of firm supporters of our 
constitutions and laws and the most respectable examples 
of civic virtues." 

But beyoad the vague suspicion that factory life 
made for loose morals, there was hardly a trace of un- 
easiness concerning the effects of industry on the wel- 
fare of the people. No question of health, of fatigue, 
of compensation for accidents or unemployment, of 
control, of a possible rift between classes, seems to have 
occurred to the inaugurators of the industrial system. 
Early American promoters of industry were concerned 
chiefly about increasing the resources of the country. 
Children were means to this end. How fully absorbed 
the nation was in acquiring wealth is shown by an 
ingenious estimate of the value of the unused child 
labor, similar to that made by Sir William Petty in the 
seventeenth century. This was published in Niles J 
Weekly Register on October 5, 18 16. The corres- 
pondent calculated for one town that the value of 200 
unemployed children between seven and sixteen years 
old, working 45 weeks a year, would be $13,500. Chil- 
dren were rated at from $1.25 to $2 a week. The 



50 Industry and Human Welfare 

computation was carried out for the nation. It was 
reckoned that there were then 317,000 children whose 
time was not fully employed and who might be utilized 
in textile industries. The employment of all these 
children would, however, call for the establishment 
of factories with nearly 8,000,000 cotton spindles — a 
plan too large to seem immediately attainable to this 
enthusiastic estimator of the unharnessed energies of 
the nation's children. 

These promoters had the same attitude toward un- 
employed children that later Americans have expressed 
toward unutilized water power. Both thought that a 
great material resource was being wasted. The earlier 
generation failed as completely to sense the needs of 
childhood as did its successor, when brought face to 
face with the problem of natural resources, seem un- 
able to understand the value of beauty and of fore- 
sight for future generations. The failure to appre- 
ciate the necessities of children was, however, in char- 
acter with the times. Thus citizens living on the 
Brandy wine remarked in 181 5, in a petition to Con- 
gress, that "More than eight-tenths of the persons 
employed in the manufactories in the United States 
are women and children, by which the latter are earlier 
trained to industrious habits than they would other- 
wise be."* 

During the formative years of industry few dis- 
puted the propriety of employing children. Samuel 
Slater, the pioneer of the American textile industry, 
started in Rhode Island the English custom of employ- 

* "Woman and Child Wage Earners," Vol. 6:28; Senate Docu- 
ment, 61st Congress, Second Session, No. 645. 



The Worker's Family 5 1 

ing entire families in his mills.* The first records of 
the Slater mill mention prominently the names of four 
small lads. The letter of one of the early operatives 
who began work himself at ten years of age indicates 
that during 1790 and 1791 the operatives in the first 
cotton mill were almost exclusively children of from 
seven to twelve years of age. The Committee on Man- 
ufactures in 181 6 estimated that 24,000 boys under 
seventeen and 66,000 women and girls were included 
in the total calculation of 100,000 operatives in cotton 
mills, f A considerable period of time elapsed before 
there was any general recognition of the menace of 
child labor. The principle that work was the "mother 
of virtue" was deeply rooted. So prevalent was this 
idea that free traders such as Condy Raguet were com- 
pelled to argue that there was work enough for children 
in agriculture.} 

The first recorded stirring came in Rhode Island, 
where the employment of children was most exten- 
sive. In his message to the legislature in 181 8 the 
governor called attention to the need of educating 
factory children. "It is a lamentable truth," said he, 
"that too many of the living generation, who are 
obliged to labor in those works of almost unceasing 
application and industry, are growing up without an 
opportunity of obtaining that education which is neces- 
sary for their personal welfare as well as for the wel- 
fare of the whole community." A resolution provid- 
ing for the establishment of schools for the benefit of 

* "Women in Industry," page 338. 

t "The Textile Industries of the United States," page 159. 

% "Woman and Child Wage Earners," Vol. 6, page 29. 



$2 Industry and Human Welfare 

the 2,500 children between the ages of seven and four- 
teen employed in Rhode Island factories was reported 
in 1824 by Tristan Burges, who proposed to make the 
employers bear the expense of the schools. The reso- 
lution failed.* Massachusetts first made a state inves- 
tigation. A joint committee of the legislature was 
ordered on January 14, 1825, to report on the exped- 
iency of establishing a system of education for children 
employed in factories. The committee reported that 
it was inexpedient, but suggested an investigation. Al- 
though manufacturers were still petitioning for public 
aid whenever they desired it, the notion of the impro- 
priety of governmental intervention in behalf of any 
class other than the owners of industry was so strong 
that the selectmen were instructed to investigate only 
child labor found in "incorporated manufacturing 
companies." The dislike of corporations then gen- 
eral, and too, the legal fact that the corporation was a 
creature of the state, were sufficient to bring them 
within the scope of the inquiry, although unincorpor- 
ated manufacturers escaped. The legislature was 
subsequently informed that the boys and girls investi- 
gated worked twelve or thirteen hours a day, a system 
by which they have "little opportunity for daily in- 
struction." Not until 1842, however, was Massachu- 
setts willing to pass a school law, the first legislative 
milestone in the history of the liberation of American 
childhood. 

For a long time the children continued to take a 
very important part in American industry. Pennsyl- 
vania in 1848 passed the first law forbidding children 
♦"Woman and Child Wage Earners," Vol. 1, 6:31. 



The Worker's Family 53 

under twelve years old to work in cotton, woolen, silk, 
and flax factories.* The law also pronounced ten 
hours to be the legal working day in such industries. 
But children over ten years old could be employed 
longer than ten hours, if special contracts were made 
with their parents. Moreover, no proof of the age of 
the child workers was required. When the law went 
into effect manufacturers in the vicinity of Pittsburgh 
stated that the ten-hour working day would be ruin- 
ous to them so long as manufacturers in other states 
had a twelve-hour day.f A strike ensued, participated 
in by children, lasting from July 4 to August 28, at the 
end of which time it was settled, the employees winning 
their legal ten-hour day but losing sixteen per cent 
in their wages. In the course of the strike a number 
of girls were arrested for riots. One of them, a child 
of thirteen, was sent to jail for want of bail. Thir- 
teen girls were found guilty and four were acquitted. $ 
Before Pennsylvania forbade the employment of chil- 
dren under twelve at work in these textile mills, laws 
had been passed in other states limiting the hours of 
child labor. Connecticut in 1842 had forbidden chil- 
dren under fourteen years old to work more than ten 
hours a day in cotton and woolen factories, and the 
same year Massachusetts had prohibited children under 
twelve from working more than ten hours a day in 
any manufacturing industry. 

But in none of the earlier laws was a special method 

* Op. cit., 6 : 207. 

t J. Lynn Barnard, "Factory Legislation in Pennsylvania," 
University of Pennsylvania Publications, Political Economy No. 
19, page 20. 

t "Woman and Child Wage Earners," Vol. 6, page 124. 



54 Industry and Human Welfare 

of enforcement provided. In consequence, as later 
inquiry showed, the laws intended to limit the hours of 
child labor and to keep children out of factories seldom 
served their purpose. The most effectual of the early 
efforts in behalf of children were the school laws. In 
these Massachusetts was the pioneer and other indus- 
trial states followed. The first act of this character 
was the Massachusetts Statute of 1836, which pro- 
vided that children under fifteen years old must at- 
tend school three months out of twelve. Here again, 
however, no special means of enforcement were pro- 
vided and in consequence the school laws were only 
partially enforced. The report of the Massachusetts 
Labor Commission in 1866 gives conclusive and strik- 
ing evidence on this point. Edward Harris of Woon- 
socket, according to the report made to the legislature, 
"desires to call attention to the labor of children in 
the mills. Represents that, from eight years old and 
upwards, they work full time — rise at four and a half 
a.m., having thirty minutes for breakfast, forty-five 
minutes at dinner, and leave work at seven p.m., four- 
teen and a half hours. Thinks manufacturers in Mas- 
sachusetts and in Rhode Island pay little regard to the 
law respecting the employment of children." In spite 
of the fact that he belonged to the manufacturers' 
group, Mr. Harris held that a ten-hour law for women 
and children, enforced with penalties, would increase 
the intelligence of the community. Another spokes- 
man of the manufacturers urged that if the hours of 
labor were reduced, manufacturers would leave the 
state. This gentleman, J. E. Carver, of Bridgewater, 
was certain also that the workers would suffer if the 



The Worker's Family 55 

hours were reduced. "No legislation," said he, "can 
make his receipts for eight hours more than four-fifths 
of what they would be for ten hours." A different 
view of the power of politics to control prices was ex- 
pressed, however, when the manufacturers sought the 
protection of friendly import duties in order that they 
might escape foreign competition. 

Vivid pictures of the customary effects of early child 
labor were given by witnesses from industrial towns 
to the commission. T. J. Kidd, of Fall River, testi- 
fied in part as follows : 

"Question : Was there any one who ever tried to cause 
the children to be sent to school ? 

Answer: Not since old man Robeson died. 

Question: Why do not the parents send them to 
school ? 

Answer: Small help is scarce; a great deal of the 
machinery has been stopped for want of small help, so 
the overseers have been going around to draw the small 
children from the schools into the mills; the same as a 
draft in the army." 

John Wild, also of Fall River, threw light on the 
child labor situation as it existed in Massachusetts the 
year after the close of the Civil War. Wild testi- 
fied that children seven years old were employed in the 
mill. His own children worked because his earnings 
were not sufficient to support the family. Said he to 
the Labor Commission: 

"I don't know that I have any more to say, except 
that I have two little boys, one eleven and the other about 
eight and a half. I am no scholar myself because I have 
always been working in the mill, and I am sorry for it. 
I don't want my children to be brought up the same way. 
I wish to get them to work a little less hours so that I 
can send them to night school. I want, if it is possible, 
to get a law so that they can go to school and know 
how to read and write their own names." 



56 Industry and Human Welfare 

During the half century prior to the close of the 
Civil War the system of child labor was fully devel- 
oped. Not until after the Civil War was child labor ef- 
fectually challenged in this country. Even to-day the 
evil is not remedied. It is the opinion of many that 
conditions in this country never became so serious 
as they were in Great Britain, which however, it is 
fair to say, began earlier and worked with more vigor 
and intelligence in eradicating the evil than have the not 
always United States. Before it was possible to liber- 
ate children from the burden of factory labor, society 
had to be slowly enlightened. The old Puritan prin- 
ciple that work is the mother of virtue had to be modi- 
fied by a new passion for learning and for the liberty 
which workingmen believed during the first half of the 
nineteenth century could only be attained by an edu- 
cated generation. Many good and some great citizens 
served the republic well in this long struggle. Not 
least powerful was Horace Mann, who as secretary of 
the Massachusetts Board of Education came boldly to 
plead the cause of the children. Mann declared in his 
report for 1848 that "those who employ other people's 
children for profit could not entrench themselves be- 
hind the sacredness of parental rights. Their object 
is their own personal gain, a lawful and laudable ob- 
ject, it is true, but one which cannot sanction for a 
moment the infliction of a positive injury upon any 
child, or the deprivation of any privilege essential either 
to his well-being or to the permanence and prosperity of 
the state." The pioneer educator asked: "How can 
any man seek to enlarge his own gains or to pamper 
his own luxurious habits, by taking the bread of intel- 



The Worker's Family 57 

lectual and moral life from the children around him?"* 
The answer to Horace Mann's appeal was made by 
many and it has been repeated down to the present gen- 
eration. The first and most important response to a 
demand for the protection of children has usually 
been that the manufacturers did not desire it. The 
early Massachusetts legislators found it "inexpedient" 
to pass school laws, and three-quarters of a century 
later and more the legislators of North Carolina were 
finding the opposition of cotton manufacturers an in- 
surmountable obstacle to the passage of adequate child 
labor laws. The state has no right to interfere with 
private business, it has ever been argued by textile 
manufacturers. A North Carolina manufacturer said 
in 1905, when one of the losing fights for a child labor 
law was made, that it was an insult to manufacturers 
to take the management of their property away and 
vest it in the superintendent of schools. The law pro- 
vided that no boy under twelve and no girl under four- 
teen should work in the mills. A boy under fourteen 
was excluded from the factories unless he could read 
and write. The superintendent of schools was author- 
ized to approve the school certificates. That was what 
the manufacturer meant when he said the bill "takes 
the management of their property out of their hands 
and puts it in the hands of the county superintendent 
of education, who knows as much concerning the needs 
or the best interests of a factory as a billy goat knows 
about fishing." A veritable fury of opposition has 
contested the progress of public control over child 
labor. Public interference, north, west and south, has 
* "Woman and Child Wage Earners," Vol. 6, page 72. 



58 Industry and Human Welfare 

been unfailingly resented as an unwarranted intrusion 
on the part of the government by the very men who 
have consistently sought governmental interference 
whenever public aid seemed to promise nourishment for 
their profits. 

During the early decades the campaigns to take 
children out of factories found success when based on 
a demand for education and on a demand for the pro- 
tection of the health of the future citizen. Broadly 
speaking, that is still true. The great sanction of laws 
preventing the premature employment of children lies 
in the now acknowledged duty of society to coming 
generations. The state cannot permit the health of 
children to be dwarfed by toil during years when growth 
is the normal function. Nor can the state allow the 
next generation of citizens to grow up unschooled and 
in ignorance. These two principles have the approval 
of all except those who desire to exploit the energies 
of the young, and this is now a minority which decade 
by decade becomes less potent. A further principle, 
the right of the child to the pursuit of happiness, is 
now reinforcing the older doctrines. It is now known 
that children — like their elders — will play; and woe 
betide that society or that community which suffers 
the natural impulses of youth to be thwarted by indus- 
try or by any other artificial barriers. In any adequate 
consideration of the effects of industry upon human 
welfare, however brief, this factor should be taken 
into account. For, besides drafting the juvenile 
energies of the nation as into an army, industry has 
in many places taken away most of the natural oppor- 
tunities for play, even among those children who are 



The Worker's Family 59 

not absorbed into factories and mills. This state of 
affairs is apparent in any industrial city. It is most 
obvious in the working class quarters of larger munici- 
palities. In the congested districts of New York City, 
for example, little children learn while they are still 
toddling infants to gamble upon the streets. Because 
they have no normal outlets for their play energies* 
they are driven to abnormality. When the full ac- 
counting of what industry has done to childhood is 
made, these things which have such great consequences 
in the wasting of opportunities for sound development 
and in the stimulation of criminal tendencies must not 
be forgotten. 

Child labor is not an obsolete issue. In 19 10 the 
census showed that two million children between the 
ages of ten and fifteen were still employed in gainful 
occupations in the United States. The federal tax on 
the products which involve the work of children affects 
only fifteen per cent of the full number of juvenile 
workers, according to an estimate made by the National 
Child Labor Committee.* The children protected are 
those who would be employed in factories, mines, and 
quarries. Children employed in agriculture, domestic 
service, street trades, stores, messenger and delivery 
companies, tenement homework, and in restaurants and 
hotels, are not touched by the federal act, unless they 
make articles which are shipped in interstate commerce. 
State laws have improved greatly during the last 
decade, but even at the present time they permit the 
continuance of much child labor. Most states have 
adopted at least a fourteen year age limit for the in- 

* Pamphlet 303, page 4. 



60 Industry and Human Welfare 

itiation of children into industrial life and a few have 
higher limits. Child specialists now think, however, 
that sixteen should be the minimum age limit and many 
regard even that too low.* The manufacturing indus- 
tries are, it should be said, now distinctly not the 
chief offenders against children. Agriculture, which 
provided ready-made the system of child labor which 
industry so greedly took to its own purpose, still 
retains its hold upon childhood in many parts of the 
country. The National Child Labor Committee in 
recent surveys has found children, four, five and six 
years old picking cotton in the Imperial Valley of 
California. In Oklahoma, children as young as five 
were found regularly picking cotton while the average 
school attendance was only a little more than half of 
the enrolment. In Colorado five thousand children 
between five and fifteen years old were found to be 
regularly engaged in the beet industry. 

Industry did not begin child labor but industry, in 
a unique sense, did use children for its own profits. 
Manufacturers entered the worker's home and took his 
young children out and made them labor for his en- 
richment, without thought of their future or of the 
country. In time the society which created industry for 
its own ends saw that child labor was a means of 
race deterioration and consequently public intervention 
— still far from completed — was inevitable. For the 
most part, however, if the record of a century be 
taken, industry has lightened rather than added to the 
burdens carried by children. Childhood is more free 
and happier than it was a century ago. The rise of 

* Standards of Child Welfare, Children's Bureau, 1919. 



The Worker's Family 61 

industry has been coincident with this humanitarian 
development, and while manufacturers have in their 
day and generation on the whole sought to retain 
children in bondage, it is still true that mechanical 
industry has supplied the wealth which has really lib- 
erated childhood. The period during which industry 
has developed has taken work away from children — 
save in agriculture and in a few other branches — and it 
has established universal education. The child of the 
worker to-day has in these respects a very much better 
chance than the child born a century ago. 

But what about women? It has already been 
observed that manufacturers did not first set women to 
work. Family manufactures, domestic industry which 
preceded mechanical production, were very largely in 
the hands of women, servants, and children. The tex- 
tile industry was almost overwhelmingly a woman's 
industry. The effect of the establishment of manu- 
factures was accordingly chiefly to change the nature 
of woman's work. Women followed their familiar 
tasks out of the home and into the factory. Women 
were employed in the early factories because men were 
needed for heavier occupations. The pioneers of in- 
dustry believed quite sincerely that woman's place 
was the home. They were not willing to let her stay 
there because they were practical men who thought 
more of their profits than of their prejudices. Women, 
moreover, were cheaper than men. They still are. 

There can, however, be but little doubt that em- 
ployment in factories has offered certain clear advan- 
tages to women. It has defined their work more pre- 
cisely. Instead of the endless round of domestic 



62 Industry and Human Welfare 

duties definite performance during specified hours has 
been demanded. These hours were at first overpower- 
ingly long. They began at 4:30 in the morning and 
they ended at seven in the evening or later. Fourteen 
and a half hours was not an unusual stint. But after 
all those were the hours which women — and men — 
then worked on the farms during the summer. When 
hours became shorter the definiteness of industrial work 
was undoubtedly a factor which counted in its favor. 
But more than that, even the low wages of women have 
meant a step toward economic independence. Before 
manufactures came most women worked, but without 
pay. After manufacturing was established women 
continued to work, but for pay. The first textile mills 
in Rhode Island paid men for the work they per- 
formed, and also for the labors of their women and 
children. Dennis Rier contracted on January 27, 181 5, 
to work for the Poignaud and Plant Mill at Lancaster, 
Massachusetts. His agreement provided that he should 
be paid for himself, his daughter, aged twelve, his three 
sons, his sister, and her son and daughter. The fam- 
ily system was carried over into the factory in certain 
places for a time, but generally women were paid their 
own wages.* Industrial work has accordingly brought 
to women a measure of economic independence. That 
is a very great gain in the development of human lib- 
erty. But other effects of industry upon women have 
not been always happy. Women have been underpaid 
and overworked. Fatigue and strain have become so 
great a menace to the health and strength of women, 
and through them, as mothers, of the future genera- 
* "Women in Industry," page 268. 



The Worker's Family 63 

tions, that in self-defense the states began to regulate 
the conditions under which women might be employed. 
During the century and more since industry began 
to take shape in the United States the government has 
been compelled to intervene in behalf of the women 
who were employed in industry. Action of this char- 
acter has been taken grudgingly. Legislators who have 
never hesitated to grant the favors demanded by the 
promoters of industry, commerce, and transportation 
have been more than reluctant to take any public ac- 
tion in the defense of the women of the nation. Law- 
yers on the bench and at the bar who have built up 
legal sanction for novel varieties of impalpable prop- 
erty, by logic which rivals in subtlety the polemics of 
medieval casuists and theologians, have looked askance 
at the rise of new teachings concerning the duty of the 
state to protect the health and vigor of women. Manu- 
facturers and business men who have demanded and 
who have received gifts of public money, public credit, 
public lands, and who have insisted that the public 
power of taxation be diverted to their own enrichment, 
have presented an almost unbroken front against any 
public action in the interest of women workers. This 
has been true largely because at the time that manufac- 
tures were developing, political power was in the 
hands of those who possessed property. As has been 
observed, the privileges of voting and of holding 
office were the exclusive prerogatives of those who 
owned property. As the industrial revolution came 
on political barriers were torn down, but before work- 
ers learned how to use their new ballots the theories 
of laissez-faireism had become a bulwark of property 



64 Industry and Human Welfare 

holders against the demands of the workers. It is one 
of the paradoxes of our industrial history that the 
same men who insisted upon receiving public aid for 
their own enterprises should have so long been able 
to prevent their employes from obtaining assistance 
from the public authority. In time, however, the states 
began haltingly to take action in the interest of women 
workers. Along three different lines this development 
has proceeded. Hours of work, wages, and conditions 
affecting health and safety, have all been the separate 
occasions of what is now a large, if incomplete, body 
of legislation. The first enactment passed in the in- 
terest of women was the New Hampshire ten-hour 
law of 1847. This was passed largely as a result of 
the campaigning of "The Female Labor Reform Asso- 
ciation of Manchester" and it actually preceded the first 
British act on the subject. The act of Parliament, 
however, was enforced, while the pioneer American 
enactment was disregarded.* 

Very early in the development of the factory sys- 
tem women workers began to protest against the long 
hours exacted of them. The first factory operatives 
were daughters of New England farmers, artizans, 
tradesmen, and even professional men. Many of them 
worked in order that brothers might be educated. 
They were independent of spirit and confident of the 
respect of the community. As early as 1828 girl work- 
ers in cotton factories in Paterson, New Jersey, went 
on strike in order to voice their protest against a 
change in the dinner hour and to express their desire 
for the ten-hour working day. Six years later girls 

♦"Woman and Child Wage Earners," 10:80. 



The Worker's Family 65 

employed in the textile mills of Lowell, the model fac- 
tory city of early New England, assembled to hear an 
address on the necessity of organization for the purpose 
of securing the eight-hour day* From these pioneer 
days of industry the question of working hours has 
never become quiet. Constant improvements in ma- 
chinery were made and the production expected of the 
individual worker became accordingly greater. In 
March, 1836, the girls of Amesbury were told that 
they must tend two looms in the future without any 
increase in pay. They went on strike.f In spite of 
the success of a number of their historic efforts at trade 
organization it soon became plain that alone and un- 
aided women could not hope to obtain a reasonable 
adjustment of their working hours. In consequence, 
relief was sought from legislative rather than from 
union activity. The first demands for state action 
came, however, almost exclusively from the organized 
workers themselves, who at that time sought protective 
laws for men as well as for women. $ It has been noted 
that New Hampshire passed the first ten-hour day for 
women. The next year Pennsylvania and Maine 
passed similar laws. The Pennsylvania Act of 1848 
established the ten-hour day as the legal working day 
in textile and paper factories. But special contracts 
requiring a longer number of hours could be made. 
Seven cotton factories in Allegheny City stopped work 
on July 4, on the ground that they could not continue 
profitably on the ten-hour basis. On August 28 they 

* Op. cit., page 2%. 
t Idem, page 35. 
% Idem, page 80. 



66 Industry and Human Welfare 

resumed operations, but with wages reduced sixteen 
per cent.* On the whole, moreover, it is true that 
these first laws were not enforced. The states were 
not entirely aware that special machinery was essential 
to the enforcement of industrial legislation. They 
imagined that local authorities could enforce factory 
laws. Furthermore, the popular American doctrine 
that laws might be effectually repealed by a failure to 
provide for their observance was also at work. Then 
as now the interests which could not prevent the pas- 
sage of a law found the power to prevent its enforce- 
ment. Not until 1879, when Massachusetts showed 
the way, had an American state passed an enforceable 
law for the purpose of limiting the hours of labor 
of women, f In 1908 the Oregon ten-hour law for 
women was upheld by the United States Supreme 
Court. By 1920 there were only six states which had 
failed to place restrictions on the hours of labor per- 
mitted women in industrial employment. An admir- 
able statement of the present liberal attitude toward 
such legislation was formulated by the President's In- 
dustrial Conference, which in its final report dated 
March, 1920, said: 

"Women cannot enter industry without safeguards 
additional to those provided for men, if they are to be 
equally protected. The danger of exploiting their phys- 
ical and nervous strength with cumulative ill effects upon 
the next generation is more serious and the results are 
more harmful to the community. Specia! provision is 
needed to keep their hours within reason, to prohibit 
night employment in factories and workshops, and to 
exclude them from those trades offering particular 
dangers to women." 

* "Factory Legislation in Pennsylvania," page 20. 
t "Principles of Labor Legislation," page 233. 



The Worker's Family 67 

The number of employments included in the prohi- 
bitions of the laws are those which the legislatures 
regard as dangerous to health. Domestic service and 
agricultural labor are not limited in the United States. 
The laws of Pennsylvania, for example, include "any 
place . . . where work is done for compensation of any 
sort with the exception of private home and farm- 
ing."* 

In one aspect of this limitation of the working hours 
of women the United States has been notably 
backward. That is the failure to prohibit night work. 
Night work, injurious to all, is peculiarly dangerous 
to women because, as repeated investigations have 
shown, women in addition to their factory labor carry 
on the responsibilities of homemaking. Many who 
are employed during the night by industry care dur- 
ing the day for their homes and their children. So 
notorious is this evil that as a result of a conference 
of fourteen leading European powers held at Berne 
in 1906, the abolition of night work for women was 
recommended. By 191 2 the principal European na- 
tions which were party to this conference had enacted 
legislation outlawing night work for women. f Some 
forms of night work for women were forbidden by 
the laws of thirteen American states by 1920, but gen- 
erally speaking the United States is in this respect a 
backward nation. 

In addition to laws limiting the hours of labor for 
women and children society has been compelled to pro- 

* "Principles of Labor Legislation," page 236. 

t Idem, page 273 ; also "The Employment of Women and Chil- 
dren and the Berne Conventions of 1906," Harrison & Sons, 
London, 1919. 



68 Industry and Human Welfare 

vide other means of protection. Some industrial 
processes are so inherently dangerous that it has been 
deemed advisable to exclude women and children from 
them. Striking examples of legislation of this kind 
were the effectual prohibition of the use of phos- 
phorus in match manufacturing and the prohibition 
of the employment of women and children in mines. 
Phosphorus caused one of the most terrible of occu- 
pational diseases — "phossy jaw"- — a disease to which 
men also are subject, but unlike European countries 
the United States was able to end this evil only by the 
indirect method of imposing a prohibitive tax on 
matches containing white phosphorus and forbidding 
their import or export.* Some European countries 
have also prohibited the use of white lead in industrial 
processes, but in this matter the United States has 
failed to act. Regulation of dangerous industrial proc- 
esses was built up on laws designed to protect women 
and children, but at the present time many of these 
hazards are recognized as equally dangerous to men. 
In one way the necessity of safeguarding women 
against destructive labor in factories has been used 
unfairly against them. The Women's Bureau of the 
United States Department of Labor has pointed out 
that women are excluded from a number of industrial 
processes which are quite as dangerous to men as to 
women.f Thus, for example, women are not per- 
mitted by the laws of some states to be employed on 
polishing and grinding machines because of the danger 

* "Principles of Labor Legislation," page 355. 
t "The New Position of Women in American Industry/' page 
52. 



The Worker's Family 69 

of tuberculosis. The reasonable public policy in a 
case such as this is to devise methods of removing 
the dust hazard, which is quite as much a menace to 
men as to women. Women have been excluded from 
trades on the specious ground that their health was 
especially jeopardized when as a matter of fact men 
desired merely to escape their competition. In con- 
sequence the present tendency is toward reconstruct- 
ing the industrial process so that it may be carried on 
without danger to either sex rather than excluding 
women from it. 

In another respect society has intervened to protect 
women. Massachusetts in 191 1 passed a law forbid- 
ding the employment of women two weeks before and 
four weeks after childbirth in industry or commerce. 
Four other states have enacted similar laws, but the 
United States as a whole is far behind European 
countries in this respect. The minimum standards as 
to these matters formulated by the International Labor 
Conference held at Washington in 19 19 are more- 
over in advance of any legislation which has proved 
acceptable to an American state. One of the tests 
both for the number of hours during which women 
may safely work and for the industrial processes in 
which they should be permitted to participate is ob- 
tained as a result of scientific inquiry. It is now to 
a certain degree possible to measure fatigue and hazard 
and to fix standards on the basis of observation, al- 
though in these affairs social philosophy is still a more 
important guide than physiological science. A num- 
ber of states, and also the federal government in so 
far as it participates in industry, have, however, begun 



yo Industry and Human Welfare 

to approach such questions by the road of scientific in- 
vestigation. 

Women's wages have been traditionally low. 
Women were employed in industry because they were 
cheaper than men. In the home they had worked with- 
out payment. In domestic service their wage was ridic- 
ulously small. In New England during 1808 servants 
were paid seventy cents a week on the average and fifty 
cents a week in 181 5.* The competition of textile 
factories raised the level of wages so that by 1849 ^ e 
wages of servants ranged from $1.25 to $1.50 a week.f 
The wages of domestic servants were supplemented by 
board and lodging, however, and that was of first im- 
portance. Manufacturing industries did not create a 
low wage system : they merely took advantage of the 
system which already existed. The clothing industry, 
which as early as 1828 began to establish "sweat 
shops," J was one of the worst offenders. Mathew 
Carey reckoned in that year that of the eighteen to 
twenty thousand working women in Baltimore, Phila- 
delphia, New York, and Boston, at least twelve thous- 
and could not earn by constant employment, sixteen 
hours out of the twenty- four, more than $1.25 weekly. 
Carey estimated in 1831 the annual income and ex- 
penses of the average sewing woman as follows : 
Forty-four weeks' wages at $1.25 $55-00 

Lodgings, 50 cents per week $26.00 

Fuel, 25 cents per week, but say only 12^ . . 6.50 32.50 

Remains for victuals and clothes $22.50 

* Sixteenth Annual Report, Mass. Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 
pages 228, 238. 
f "Woman and Child Wage Earners, Vol. 9, page 179. 
t Idem, page 127. 



The Worker's Family yi 

The wages paid in the textile mills were a distinct 
advance. The average weekly wage in Massachusetts 
cotton factories in 1831 was said to be $2.25. At the 
same time the average wage in New York and New 
Jersey was placed at $1.90. At Lowell, where condi- 
tions were esteemed especially good, women's wages 
were said to be from $1 to $3 weekly in addition to 
board. The wages paid in the textile mills, low as they 
were, were higher than the customary rates in familiar 
vocations. They tended, moreover, generally to raise 
the rates at which women were compensated. None 
the less, industry, after having drawn women out of the 
home, failed on the whole to provide equivalent sup- 
port for them. The wages of women were not in- 
tended generally to maintain them. They supplemented 
the support provided in the family, although often at 
times, as in Lowell, the rate of factory pay was actual- 
ly sufficient for the independent support of the women 
employed. But, commonly, industry has paid women 
less than their maintenance. It has been parasitic to 
that extent. During the winter of 1908 and the spring 
of 1909 the field work for the study of the Condition 
of Woman and Child Wage Earners in the United 
States was done. The situation in twenty-three indus- 
tries in seventeen states was investigated. A compre- 
hensive picture of the wages paid women was obtained. 
At that time nearly seventy-three per cent of the women 
employed in industry, eighteen years old and over, got 
less than $8 a week, and nearly ninety per cent got less 
than $10 a week.* At that time $8 a week was the 
least at which an American woman could support her- 

* "Woman and Child Wage Earners," Vol. 18, page 23. 



72 Industry and Human Welfare 

self in health and decency. In spite of this two-fifths 
of the women investigated earned less than $6 a week. 
One-eighth earned less than $4 a week. Industry 
which employed women was obviously parasitic. 

Women employed in industry, taken in the mass, 
have never earned living wages in this country. The 
textile industry notably has paid family wages, that is, 
each worker has been paid so little that only the united 
efforts of all available workers sufficed to support the 
family. Women seemed unable successfully to chal- 
lenge this state of affairs and consequently, beginning 
in 1 9 10, a few American states have intervened. Min- 
imum wage laws were passed. The minimum wages 
set for different industries have usually been higher 
than what was previously paid but low in themselves. 
The year 19 19 is counted a period of extremely high 
wages. During the first four months of that year 
an investigation of the wages paid in the corset indus- 
try in Massachusetts was made. "Of the adult work- 
ers, those eighteen years of age and over, 62.1 per cent 
earn less than $12 a week."* In spite of the fact that 
the inquiry was made at a time when wages generally 
were reputed to have attained unprecedented levels in 
this country, the Massachusetts Minimum Wage Com- 
mission was compelled to state in its decree "that the 
wages supplied a substantial number . . . were inade- 
quate to supply the necessary cost of living and to 
maintain the workers in health." The commission ac- 
cordingly fixed a wage of $13 a week for experienced 
employes. Thrift is preached to the poor. The figure 
allowed for saving was 37 cents a week. If the women 

♦Massachusetts Minimum Wage Commission, Bulletin 21. 



The Worker's Family 73 

were employed every week in the year, a condition 
altogether rare, they would not at this rate be able to 
accumulate $20 annually. Minimum wages, in spite 
of the greater liberality of some commissions, such, 
for example, as the District of Columbia body, are 
indeed minima ! They are designed to maintain physi- 
cal life in more or less discomfort and that is all. 

But the employment of married women is far more 
serious in some of its effects. Industry transferred 
woman's work from the home to the factory. Much 
of industry did pay men such small wages that it was 
necessary for women to continue at work in the fac- 
tories in spite of the burden of childbearing. That 
was a partial result of the family wage system. It 
has had good effects as well as bad ones. The em- 
ployment of women after marriage has done much to 
dethrone the tyrant husband and father who was so 
prominent a figure when the first feminists were dream- 
ing of the liberation of women. Nothing has been of 
greater importance in the social and economic enfran- 
chisement of woman than her capacity to earn wages. 
Industrial necessity accomplished what could have 
hardly been achieved in any other manner. It brought 
good in its train. When factory owners began to 
attract women to their establishments, human freedom 
took a step forward. Not that the industrial promoters 
had any desire to help the cause of liberty. So far 
as their writings show, they were not even aware that 
their conduct had such an effect. But while women 
were more free because of their industrial employment, 
children suffered from the lack of maternal care. How 
serious a factor this has been was first indicated with 



74 Industry and Human Welfare 

clarity in the studies made by the federal Children's 
Bureau. 

Inadequate wages paid men have been shown by 
the Children's Bureau studies to bear a very clear re- 
lationship to the infant death rate. In Manchester, 
New Hampshire, for example, a textile city, among 
families in which the fathers' earnings were less than 
$494 a year, the infant death rate was 262.4 per 
thousand. When the fathers' earnings had risen to 
$1,092 or more a year, the infant death rate had fal- 
len to 53.2 per thousand. In other words, the child 
of a man who earned at least $1,092 a year had five 
times a better chance at life than the child of the man 
in the lowest wage group.* The low wage groups, 
moreover, comprise by far the largest number of fam- 
ilies. It is therefore fair to say that the children of 
the men employed in industries die needlessly because 
of the scanty incomes of their fathers, or because of 
conditions generally accompanying such small earn- 
ings. It was found f that "the babies of working 
mothers in Manchester had a higher infant mortality 
rate than the babies whose mothers were not gainfully 
employed." Furthermore, it was found that "insuf- 
ficient or low earnings on the part of the father appear 
to be the most potent reason for the mother's going 
to work. Where the fathers earned less than $450 a 
year, 73.3 per cent of the mothers were gainfully em- 
ployed during some part of the year after the baby's 
birth. With each rise in economic status, the propor- 

* U. S. Children's Bureau, Infant Mortality Series No. 6, 1917, 
page 16. 

t Op. cit., page 47. 



The Worker's Family 75 

tion of babies with mothers gainfully employed falls 
but does not really reach a small proportion, 9.6 per 
cent, until the group with fathers earning $1,050 a 
year and over is reached." When women were gain- 
fully employed during the year before the baby's birth, 
the death rate was 199.2 per thousand. One child in 
every five died. When women were not gainfully 
employed, taking all wage groups, low and high, the 
mortality rate was 133.9 per thousand.* When the 
employment the year after the baby's birth was stud- 
ied even more striking results were found. The death 
rate for the babies of those gainfully employed was 
220.9; °f those who did not have to work, only i22.o.f 
Other studies made by the Children's Bureau in this 
country and by the Local Government Board in Great 
Britain give a more general basis for these conclusions. 
The forced employment of women in industry has 
taken an enormous toll of child life. How great this 
loss has been is incalculable, but the rates learned by 
the most scrupulous study show that it must have been 
vast and appalling. That great source of waste indi- 
cates a part of the effects of the industrial system on 
the worker's family. 

This takes no account, however, of underfeeding 
and the stunted development which comes therefrom. 
Studies made of urban children have indicated that as 
high as fifteen to twenty per cent of the entire child 
population are underfed or are suffering from defects 
attributable to imperfect nutrition.} How many chil- 

* Op. cit., page 50. 
t Op. cit., page 52. 

t Standards of Child Welfare, U. S. Children's Bureau Pub- 
lication No. 60, page 238. 



76 Industry and Human Welfare 

dren were underfed during the years before factories 
congregated people in cities no one knows. It is, how- 
ever, hardly probable that so many actually suffered 
the pangs of hunger. Studies of health among rural 
children of the present time show on the other hand 
that country children suffer from more remediable ills 
than do the city bred. It is probable, therefore, that 
defects which arise from an imperfectly balanced diet- 
ary were more common prior to the industrial revo- 
lution. This is to be attributed to the fact that all 
classes are now able to obtain a far more varied diet 
than was possible before the development of cold stor- 
age and rapid transportation. 

Industry has thus had divers effects upon the home 
of the worker. It has taken his wife and his chil- 
dren and through their toil with the aid of machines 
created fabulous wealth. It has given the worker's 
wife and daughter an income, but not sufficient to sup- 
port them. It has been a parasite on the labor of 
women and children. It has killed babies by depriv- 
ing them of a mother's care. It has depressed child- 
hood by taking away the opportunity for life out-of- 
doors. But the same industry has contributed might- 
ily to the social and economic enfranchisement of 
women. It has broadened woman's life and given her 
greater independence of man. It has provided the 
wealth through which later generations are freeing 
childhood of the immemorial burden of production. 
In its promise, at any rate, it has been gain for the 
family, 



CHAPTER IV 

WAGES IN INDUSTRY 

Industry transferred the work of women and chil- 
dren from the home to the factory. The workingman's 
wife and children perforce forsook their home in order 
to obtain employment. To the extent to which women 
and children were drawn from domestic industry to 
factories it is accordingly fair to say that machinery 
entered and broke the circle of the workingman's home. 
Industry has also augmented vastly the sum of national 
wealth and income. It is important, therefore, to as- 
certain how these changes have affected the standard 
of living, the earnings and the comparative wealth of 
the manual workers of the nation. Have employees 
of industry been paid a living wage? Have wage 
earners had a fair share of the increased income made 
possible by the factory system? Have mechanics and 
laborers been able to obtain justly proportionate shares 
of the wealth in whose creation they have played so 
essential a part? 

In attempting to answer these questions it gives per- 
spective to recall the way of life of mechanics and 
laborers during the decades prior to the industrial revo- 
lution. In spite of the rising tide of political democ- 
racy, social distinctions were well fixed at the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth century. As late as 1773 students 

77 



78 Industry and Human Welfare 

at Harvard had been rated according to their social 
status.* The differences between the rich and the poor 
were wide and deep. The clothing of the workingman 
is known from the descriptions given by those who ad- 
vertised for the return of their run-away servants and 
redemptioners. Workingmen and boys generally wore 
leather breeches. These as well as the rest of his 
apparel were made at home or in the neighborhood. 
Professor Bidwell quotes a manuscript prepared by 
Governor Treadwell of Connecticut in 1802 or 1803, 
which discussed clothing in detail. f Men commonly 
had two suits, one for work and the other for society. 
For summer the working costume consisted of a 
"check homespun linen shirt, a pair of plain tow cloth 
trowsers, and a vest generally much worn, formerly 
with but more modernly without sleeves; or simply 
a brown tow cloth frock and trowsers, and sometimes 
a pair of old shoes tied with leather strings and a felt 
hat, or an old beaver hat stiffened and worn white with 
age. During winter wool and buckskin were sub- 
stituted for linen and tow cloth. Shoes were of the 
roughest sort, home-made from the hides." Clothes 
and food were provided by home manufactures. 
Weeden relates the story of Mrs. Mary Moody Emer- 
son, aunt of the great Emerson and herself a woman of 
culture and distinction. She was born about the time 
of the Declaration of Independence. She had ten 
dollars a year in cash. It was used for food and 
charity. Salt, molasses, rum, tea and coffee were the 



* "Economic and Social History of New England," by William 
B. Weeden, page 739. 
t "Rural Economy in New England," by Percy Wells Bidwell. 



Wages in Industry 79 

principal articles purchased by small farmers at the 
beginning of the industrial revolution. Life was hard. 
The pioneer cabins are perpetuated in the rude huts 
now frequently seen in the Appalachian mountain 
ranges. These were built of logs or of slabs. They 
were cold, ill-ventilated, dark and wretchedly crowded. 
Privacy seems to have been a luxury unknown among 
the poor. It still is, to a lesser extent. H. N. Slater, 
the son of Samuel Slater, told William B. Weeden that 
when his father was recruiting labor for the first cot- 
ton factory he had found a man named Arnold with a 
family of ten or eleven living in a rude cabin chiefly 
of slabs, with a chimney of stone. Yet Mrs. Arnold 
liked her home. She stipulated that Samuel Slater 
must provide a house equally good for her. 

The chief articles in the diet of one family whose 
record has been obtained were milk, corn bread and 
bean porridge.* That family was far above the aver- 
age in intelligence. Two of the sons became profes- 
sional men of wide distinction. Felt,f who is quoted 
by Bidwell, said: "For more than a century and a 
half (i. e., up until almost 1800) most of them had 
pea and bean porridge, or broth made of the liquor of 
boiled salt meat and pork mixed with meal, and some- 
times hasty pudding and milk — both morning and 
evening." Beef, pork, and mutton were supplied by 
the farmer's own herds. Most of the meat was dried, 
salted or pickled. The common bread of the country 
was a mixture of rye and cornmeal. Fruits and vege- 
tables were fairly abundant. Apples furnished cider, 

* Weeden, 862. 

t "Rural Economy in New England," page 350; "History of 
Ipswich," page 30. 



80 Industry and Human Welfare 

the favorite beverage of colonial New England. Maple 
sugar and honey were obtained on the farm. 

The wages paid those first Slater employees 
varied from 80 cents to $1.40 a week, according to 
H. N. Slater's memory. In 1801 carpenters were paid 
about a dollar a day in Massachusetts.* Laborers 
were paid from sixty to ninety cents a day. Painters 
seem to have had about sixty cents. Some teachers 
were paid $30 a month. Substantially the same wage 
level was maintained between 1800 and 181 5, accord- 
ing to the late Carroll D. Wright's summary of this 
report. In the Memoir of Samuel Slater an article by 
Z. Allen intended to show wage levels in 1825 is in- 
cluded. The wages quoted are designed to show the 
high rates paid in the United States in comparison with 
those which then obtained in England and France. 
This was a part of the tariff argument, and the figures 
given are accordingly perhaps high. None the less, 
the wage rates are fairly significant. The table for 
the United States, abbreviated, is as follows : t 

A common laborer earns per day about $1.00 

A carpenter 1.45 

A mason " 1.62 

A farm laborer (per month and found) " 8.00 to 10.00 

A servant maid (per week and found) " 1.00 to 1.50 

Best machine makers, forgers, etc., per day.. " 1.50 to 1.75 
Ordinary machine makers, forgers, etc., per 

day " 1.25 to 1.42 

Common mule spinners in cotton mills " 1.08 to 1.40 

Common mule spinners in woolen mills " 1.08 

Weavers on hand looms .90 

Boys of 10 or 12 years of age, ditto, per week " 1.50 

Women in cotton mills, per week, average. . 2.00 to 3.00 

Women in woolen mills, per week, average. . 2.50 

* Wages and Prices: 1 752-1 860— 1 6th Annual Report, Mass. 
Bureau of Statistics of Labor, page 219. 
t "Memoir of Samuel Slater," page 340. 



Wages in Industry 81 

The figures reported in McLane's documents * 
vary somewhat for different establishments and dif- 
ferent parts of the country. A Philadelphia cotton 
mill reported' for 1832 that 15 men averaged $7 a 
week and that 65 women and 46 boys averaged $1.50. 

But before the industrial revolution the laborer and 
artizan seldom lived by wages alone. If he was a re- 
demptioner, his master was responsible for his support. 
If he was a freeman he tilled the soil as well as fol- 
lowed his trade. The villages of the New England 
towns were homes of artizans who were also farmers. 
The villagers had lots of from two to ten acres and in 
addition more distant fields. The mechanical trades — 
carpentry, cobbling, tanning, blacksmithing, and mill- 
ing — were, in the words of Professor Bidwell, "usu- 
ally only auxiliary occupations, by-industries of agri- 
culture." The connection between agriculture and the 
mechanical trades was well described from his own 
observation by Tench Coxe f as follows : 

"Those of the tradesmen and manufacturers who live 
in the country generally reside on small lots and farms, 
from one acre to twenty; and not a few upon farms 
from twenty to one hundred and fifty acres, which they 
cultivate at leisure times, with their own hands, their 
wives, children, servants and apprentices, and sometimes 
by hired laborers or by letting out fields, for a part of the 
produce, to some neighbor who has time or farm hands 
not fully employed. This union of manufactures and 
farming is found to be very convenient on the grain 
farms ; but it is still more convenient on the grazing and 
grass farms, where part of almost every day and a great 
part of the year can be spared from the business of the 
farm and employed in some mechanical handicraft or 
manufacturing business. Those persons often make 

* "The Manufactures in the U. S.," Vol. 2, 1832, page 220. 
t "View of the United States," pages 44 2 "443- 



82 Industry and Human Welfare 

domestic and farming carriages, implements and utensils, 
build houses and barns, tan leather and manufacture hats, 
shoes, hosiery, cabinet work and other articles of clothing 
and furniture, to the great convenience of the neighbor- 
hood. In like manner some of the farmers, at leisure 
times and proper seasons, manufacture nails, potash, 
pearlash, staves and heading, hoops and hand pikes, ax- 
handles, maple sugar, etc. The most judicious planters 
in the Southern States are industriously instructing their 
negroes, particularly the young, the old, the infirm and 
the females, in manufactures: a wise and humane 
measure." 

Professor Bidwell concluded from his investigations 
that as late as 1810 practically none of the employees 
of the New England factories depended exclusively 
for their living on their income derived from manufac- 
tures. The industrial population was even then only 
beginning to be differentiated from the great mass of 
agricultural workers. In the undifferentiated industrial 
life nearly everybody had enough to eat. The variety 
was narrowly restricted and many of the things eaten 
were doubtless hard to digest. At times pioneers are 
reported to have been near the starvation line. Travel- 
ers who called at such cabins in the wilderness brought 
back word that they had been refused food because of 
the scarcity. But on the whole the testimony points 
in the other direction. Of the food they had, they had 
enough. There was probably little underfeeding, al- 
though there was undoubtedly — if modern surveys of 
regions which reproduce colonial conditions may be 
taken as guides — much malnutrition. The cheap land, 
however, gave men a sense of freedom if it did not 
always raise their level of living, and therefore it gave 
them contentment with a comparatively low standard 
of life. Measured by the quality and variety of housing, 



Wages in Industry 83 

of food, of clothing, the workers of days before fac- 
tories had been developed in this country were worse 
off than are their descendants. On the other hand, 
if instead of quality and variety, quantity and regular- 
ity of income are the measuring rods, the workers of 
1800 were vastly more prosperous than are their suc- 
cessors who live during the first decades of the 
twentieth century. For as long as men raised sheep, 
and women spun and wove wool, clothing was attain- 
able. Farmers do not face the hazard of unemploy- 
ment in the degree of industrial workers. The farmer 
may lack a market for his products but he is never 
without the need to provide crops for himself, his 
household, and his livestock. In so far, therefore, as 
industrial workers were also agricultural workers, they 
had a security of life at a low scale which is quite be- 
yond the grasp of modern industrial workers. Horace 
Bushnell, however, who remembered the earlier per- 
iod, said of it : 

"No mode of life was ever more expensive : it was life 
at the expense of labor too stringent to allow the highest 
culture and the most proper enjoyment. Even the dress 
of it was more expensive than we shall ever see again." 

Because of this undifferentiated industrial life wages 
actually paid at the beginning of the industrial revo- 
lution are hard to compare with the present levels. So 
long as artizans had even small plots of land, so long 
as it was usual to possess a cow, a pig and chickens, 
and to tend a garden, the blacksmith or the tailor or 
the shoemaker was not solely dependent on his wages. 
He had supplementary sources of income. Modern 
industry with its congestion in cities has taken away 



84 Industry and Human Welfare 

these perquisites. The nominal wages now paid must 
purchase many things which the predecessors of the 
present wage earners "found" for themselves. Nom- 
inal wages in 1830 must accordingly have been far 
lower than the apparent rates in 1921 before they could 
be equal. Nominal wages have clearly increased. The 
rates from 1840 to 1891 were calculated for the Aldrich 
Committee.* Relative wages were calculated in gold 
for all occupations of which the investigators had 
records. Taking five-year intervals the table is as fol- 
lows, using the wage rates paid in January, i860, as 

the base: , M . 

Average According 
Year Simple Average to Importance 

1840 87.7 82.5 

1845 86.8 85.7 

1850 92.7 90.9 

1855 98.0 97.5 

i860 100.0 100.0 

1865 66.2 68.7 

1870 133.7 136.9 

1875 140.8 140.4 

1880 141.5 143.0 

1885 150.7 155.9 

1890 158.9 168.2 

1891 160.7 168.6 

The changes from 1890 to 1903 were reported in 
the Nineteenth Annual Report of the United States 
Commissioner of Labor, published in 1904. This re- 
port computed the average for 1890- 1899. Reckoning 
from that as a basis the changes in weekly earnings 
per employee are as follows: 

1890 101.0 

1895 984 

1900 104.1 

1903 112.3 

* U. S. Senate Doc. 52, Congress 2d Session Report 1394. 
Part 1, page 14. 



Wages in Industry 85 

An index number of wages was also published in 
the Monthly Labor Review of the U. S. Bureau of 
Labor Statistics for February, 1921. This table was 
figured on a currency basis during the Civil War. Farm 
wages are excluded. The rates quoted for 1920 were 
taken during the summer months and "probably repre- 
sent the wage peak of the year." It is as follows, 
using five-year intervals: 



Year 


Index Number 


1840 


33 


1845 


33 


1850 


35 


i860 


39 


1865 


58 


1870 


67 


1875 


67 


1880 


60 


1885 


60 


1890 


69 


1895 


68 


1900 


73 


1005 


82 


1910 


93 


1915 


103 


1920 


234 



It is obvious from these calculations, based as they 
are on wage rates without any reference to annual 
earnings, that the nominal wages paid have increased 
greatly during the industrial revolution. It is fairly 
safe to assert that real wages have also been aug- 
mented. The change from hand production to the 
factory system, however, it must be remembered, has 
been contemporaneous with a social revolution. In 
1800 the employment of children was counted a disci- 
pline leading to virtue as well as a source of proper 
profit for their parents and guardians. At present the 



86 Industry and Human Welfare 

employment of children in industry or agriculture is 
known to be a serious handicap to their normal de- 
velopment as workers and as citizens. Similarly, in 
1800 the wife and mother was supposed to perform 
certain duties. A part, a very heavy part, of the bur- 
den of family support rested upon her. At the pres- 
ent time the employment of the mothers of young 
children outside the home is known to be evil. Because 
of the changes which the factory system has entailed, 
mothers and children can no longer safely share to the 
same extent in the maintenance of the family. Con- 
sequently society has been impelled to formulate a new 
standard in measuring wages. The wage earner to- 
day is supposed to earn enough to support in health, 
if not in comfort, himself, a wife, and three children 
under fourteen years of age. That standard of aspir- 
ation has seldom been realized in the United States 
so far as the great majority of workers in industry 
are concerned. Nominal wages have increased enor- 
mously, and real wages have advanced considerably, 
but at no time in the history of the United States have 
a majority of the male workers been able to support 
themselves and their families. It has never been pos- 
sible for working-class mothers to remain in their 
homes since the factory system was entrenched. Not 
only is that true, but also, as was previously noted, 
numerous inquiries show that women employed in in- 
dustry have been paid less than the minimum sum 
required to support the worker alone in health. Real- 
ization of this fact has resulted in the striking devel- 
opment of minimum wage laws for women during the 
last few years. 



Wages in Industry 87 

The Senate Immigration report printed in 191 1 * 
offered illuminating evidence concerning the insuf- 
ficiency of the earnings of male heads of households. 
Studies were made of different industries. The aver- 
age annual earnings of the husbands at work in silk 
goods manufacturing and dyeing were reported to be 
$668 for native white Americans and $426 for the 
foreign-born. At that time the cost of supporting a 
family in New York City was between $800 and $900. 
It is manifest that on the average neither American 
men nor foreigners employed in the silk industry were 
able unaided to maintain their families. More than 
three-quarters of the male heads of families employed 
in this industry got less than $600 a year, and more 
than ninety-five per cent got less than $800, the mini- 
mum sum reckoned at that time to be needful for the 
support of a family of five in health. The manufac- 
ture of cotton goods affords interesting data for the 
reason that textile factories were the pioneers of the 
industrial revolution in the United States. The aver- 
age annual earnings of the white American husbands 
in this industry were found by the Immigration Com- 
mission to be $585, while the annual earnings of the 
foreign-born husbands amounted to $461. The find- 
ings of various governmental reports has been sum- 
marized by W. Jett Lauck and Edgar Sydenstricker 
who undertook the study for the United States Com- 
mission on Industrial Relations. In "Conditions of 
Labor in American Industries," f a study recapitulating 

*6ist Congress, 2d Session, Senate Document 633, Vol. 73, 
page 43- 

f Page 61. See also U. S. Bureau Labor Statistics, Bulletin 75, 
pages 23 and 24, and Immigration Commission Reports, Vol. 19, 
page 226. 



88 Industry and Human Welfare 

the important federal and state investigations into 
wages, the authors said : 

"An examination of all authoritative data on annual 
earnings of workers during recent years appears to 
indicate that the following are warrantable conclusions : 

"i. That fully one-fourth of the adult male workers 
in the principal industries and trades who are heads of 
families earned less than $400, one-half less than $600, 
four-fifths less than $800, and less than one-tenth earned 
as much as $1,000 a year. 

"2. That fully a third of all male workers 18 years of 
age and over in the principal industries and trades, 
whether heads of families or not, earned less than $400, 
two-thirds earned less than $600 and about one-twentieth 
earned over $1,000. 

"3. That approximately a fourth of women workers 
18 years of age and over who are regularly employed in 
the principal manufacturing industries earned less than 
$200, and two-thirds earned less than $400 a year." 

This summary was made during 1914 and 191 5 and 
it was designed to portray conditions which obtained 
at that time. The actual inquiries were made prev- 
iously. The field work of the Immigration Commis- 
sion, for example, was carried on during 1908 and 
1909. None the less, wage rates collected by the 
United States Bureau of Labor Statistics and by some 
of the state labor boards indicate that the picture is 
fairly indicative of the facts in 1914. The war time 
changes in wages were so great, however, both in the 
United States and abroad, that it is essential to take 
into consideration the gains made since July, 19 14. In 
some industries these have been notable. The aver- 
age weekly wage for male wool sorters was $14.97, 
according to the accounting of the U. S. Bureau of 
Labor Statistics in 1914. In 1920 the average wage 
became $41.90.* 
* Monthly Labor Review, March, 1921. 



Wages in Industry 89 

Since 1920, however, wages have been sharply re- 
duced in the wool industry and elsewhere. Card tenders 
were paid on the average $8.26 weekly during 191 4. By 
1920 their average had risen to $24.88, but this too 
has been subject to the same general reduction. Dur- 
ing 1919 a wage of slightly more than $40 weekly was 
the least sum at which a family could be supported 
in health under urban conditions. A report of the 
Industrial Commission of Ohio shows the wages of 
employees of all the manufacturing industries of that 
state for 191 9. Out of 932,808 male wage earners 
over 18 years of age, only 153,040 were above the $40 
mark. The vast majority got less than enough to sup- 
port a family in 19 19 at high price and wage levels, 
just as they had gotten too little for family support in 
19 1 4 on a lower price scale.* A rapid survey f of the 
wages and hours of labor during the year 1919 was 
made by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the instance 
of the War Industries Board. This study summarized 
facts concerning more than 400,000 wage earners. It 
is accordingly one of the most extensive, if not one of 
the most detailed, researches ever made in this field. 
The average weekly earnings of men employed in 
industry amounted to $25.56 during the two weeks 
studied. The average wage of women in industry was 
$13,564 The inquiry, however, was limited to a single 
payroll period and it was made at a time when some 
of the industries reported were maintaining high pro- 
duction while others were reducing their output. The 

* Monthly Labor Review, February, 1921. 

t Industrial Survey in Selected Industries in the U. S., 1919, 
U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, No. 265. 
%ldem, computed from Table 5, pages 37-38. 



90 Industry and Human Welfare 

figures collected by the National Industrial Con- 
ference Board, an organization of industrial associa- 
tions, designed to present the point of view of em- 
ployers, depict a similar situation.* 

The National Industrial Conference Board reported 
that its inquiries showed that the wage level of March, 
1920 — which has been considerably lowered — was 
"from 82 per cent to 163 per cent higher than that of 
September, 1914, as measured by the full time weekly 
earnings." But percentage increases reveal less than 
actual figures. The following table, based on the tables 
of the Conference Board's report, shows the average 
full-time weekly earnings of the male employees of 
the industries cited : 

September, igid. March, 1920 

Boot and shoe $i4-5i $28.70 

Chemical 13.07 35-72 

Cotton 9.91 24.87 

Furniture 10.78 22.87 

Hosiery and knit goods... 11.25 27.65 
Leather tanning and finish- 
ing 11.01 30.18 

Metal 13.99 29.79 

Paper 13.10 28.82 

Printing and publishing... 18.33 / 3 l -&7 

Rubber 14-99 36.32 

Silk 11.10 28.98 

Wool 11.11 28.70 

The Conference Board, an agency of the manufac- 
turers who gave these figures, noted in summary that 
the "average actual weekly earnings of male workers 
increased from $11.11 in September, 1914, to $28.70 



♦Changes in Wages During and Since the War, Research 
Report 31, September, 1920, National Industrial Conference 
Board. 



Wages in Industry 91 

in March, 1920." This was indeed a rise to the extent 
of 176 per cent, but it was almost as difficult for a 
husband and father unaided to support his wife and 
children on his own earnings in 1920 as it had been 
in 1 9 14. Never, in fact, so far as is shown by the 
records which have been obtained, has the factory 
system in this country paid the average male worker 
a sum sufficient to support a family in health and com- 
fort. Yet with the rise of industry the wealth of the 
country has increased beyond imagining. This is 
shown vividly by the following table : * 



Year 


Population 


Total Wealth 


Per Capita 


1800 


5,308,483 






1830 


12,866,020 






1850 


23,191,876 


$ 7,i35,78o,ooo 


$ 307.69 


i860 


31,443,321 


16,159,616,000 


513.93 


1870 


38,558,371 


30,068,518,000 


779.83 


1880 


50,155,783 


43,642,000,000 


870.20 


1800 


62,947,714 


65,037,091,000 


i,035.57 


1000 


75,994,775 


88,517,307,000 


1,164.79 


1904 


82,466,551 


107,104,212,000 


1,318.11 


1912 


95,410,503 


187,739,071,090 


1,965.00 



Per capita wealth has been increased manifold but 
it has not brought ease to the workers in factories. It 
has been concentrated in the hands of a relatively small 
proportion of the population. The income of the nation 
has, in fact, come into the possession very largely of a 
numerically insignificant minority of people in eight 
industrial states. Together, New York, Massachusetts, 
Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Mich- 
igan, and Illinois reported for 19 18 more than 
half of the income of the United States. f About 

* Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1919, page 750. 

f Statistics of Income, Compiled from the Returns of 1918, 
under the Direction of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 
Washington, 1921 ; page 7. 



92 Industry and Human Welfare 

160,000 people admitted incomes of $10,000 or more. 
They constituted 3.61 per cent of those who had in- 
comes large enough to make returns to the govern- 
ment, but they secured more than a quarter of all the 
income taxable. Under the old agricultural system in 
the South the economic distinctions between the classes 
were as great as those which have been achieved by the 
factory system, but they were no wider. So, while in 
this country that mechanical revolution which Alex- 
ander Hamilton and others sought with such enthu- 
siasm has undoubtedly increased the sum of national 
wealth beyond all dreams, it has not hitherto provided 
the means for a comfortable or good life to those who 
bear its heavy burdens. 

Furthermore, not until recent years has there been 
any considerable demand in this country that industry 
pay living wages to its workers. The cost of living 
doctrine began to emerge first as a preachment of social 
workers who needed an economic standard to apply to 
their "cases/' Later it got the attention of legislatures 
when minimum wage laws for women were under con- 
sideration. Finally it received an ambiguous sanction 
from the government after President Wilson formally 
proclaimed the principles of the National War Labor 
Board as the basis for industrial adjustments. Dur- 
ing the war the War Labor Board, the Shipping Board 
and other public agencies utilized the principle of the 
cost of living in fixing wages. In writing the rules 
for the Railroad Labor Board, Congress also enjoined 
the federal adjusters to take the cost of living into 
consideration, although at the same time Congress said 
that the market rate must also be a factor. The market 



Wages in Industry 93 

rate, the price paid in similar industries, is often below 
the cost of living level, as the Railroad Labor Board dis- 
covered when during the summer of 192 1 the wages of 
unskilled laborers were readjusted downward. Even 
then in the case of the railroad workers, which so 
far as the federal law is concerned is unique, the rule 
of the living wage has been mitigated by the pitiless 
principle of supply and demand. 

In a condition as changing as that of the late au- 
tumn of 1 92 1 it is impossible to reckon with any pre- 
cision the general level of wages. Reductions have 
been so numerous and unemployment is so widespread 
that earlier estimates are rendered obsolete. The ex- 
ecutive of the American Federation of Labor has 
guessed that the total wage reduction during the season 
of depression which began in the autumn of 1920 
reached by August, 192 1, a total of a billion dollars. 
The calculation may be well made. No one is in a 
position to deny it. Certain is it that the unorganized 
workers have been unable to resist wholesale wage 
revisions and that in those trades where unions were 
not powerful, readjustments were made without any 
clear reference to the sum required for the support of 
a family under American conditions. Trade unions 
furthermore have not generally been strongly en- 
trenched in the trades affected by the mechanical revo- 
lution. Factory workers have accordingly especially 
suffered from the consequences of the depression of 
1920 and 1921. 

Those trades which were well unionized were on 
the other hand able to insist that the cost of living 
be used as one criterion of wage adjustments. The 



94 Industry and Human Welfare 

clothing makers, who were powerfully organized, 
secured an investigation of wages and prices and ob- 
tained a settlement which took full account of the neces- 
sary expenses of living. But they were exceptional 
among factory workers. During prosperous times the 
clothing workers and other vigorous unions have gone 
a step further in demanding not only living wages but 
a share in the profits of their industry. The locomotive 
engineers in their contention with the Western rail- 
roads were notable exponents of this point of view. 
But in recent times, except for a period during the 
World War and immediately thereafter, workers have 
been more numerous than jobs in most industries. The 
market rate and not the cost of living has been the 
chief influence determining the level of wages. Abund- 
ant immigration from Europe, however valuable its 
social and political consequences may have been, has 
tended to keep full the reservoir of "surplus" workers 
and has made possible the continuance of a low wage 
system. Even with the losses of the period of hard 
times, there seems, however, not to have been a com- 
plete return to the conditions of 19 14. Some of the 
advances were retained as increments to the slow pro- 
gress of earlier years toward the economic enfranchise- 
ment of the working population of America. 



CHAPTER V 

HOURS 

Men, women, and children worked at least twelve 
hours a day in the early factories. The routine of 
agriculture was followed by industry.* M. Plimpton 
of Southbridge, Massachusetts, reported to the Secre- 
tary of the Treasury that the regular shift of work 
was on the "average 12 hours a day, nj^ months in 
the year." This was widely the custom. Stephen 
Randal, Jr., of Randal's Mills, North Providence, re- 
ported "12 hours each day the year through." W. A. 
Andross for the Eagle Manufacturing Company, Hart- 
ford county, Connecticut, replied, "Twelve hours a 
day, all the year." Reed & Watson, of Livingston, 
New York, said, "Twelve hours per day the whole 
year." In Pennsylvania, even in early days, the work- 
ing hours were especially long. Roland Curtin, who 
owned the Eagle Iron Works of Centre county, West 
Pennsylvania, reported that the "monthly hands work 
during the whole year except at meal hours." 

These bits of testimony are thoroughly typical. The 
working day everywhere was at least twelve hours, ex- 
clusive of meal times, although this was sometimes 
shortened to ioj4 hours during the winter. Whatever 

* Documents Relative to the Manufactures in the United States. 
Executive Documents, 1st Session, 226. Congress, 1831-1832. 

95 



96 Industry and Human Welfare 

its other sins may be the factory system did not inau- 
gurate the long working day, which is an inheritance 
from other times. But without mitigation the new 
order of "labor saving" industry continued the work- 
ing hours of the farms. James Montgomery,* 
superintendent of the York factories at Saco, Maine, 
estimated in 1839, almost a decade after the reports 
previously quoted, that at Lowell the factory hours 
averaged 73 J4 a week during the year and that in the 
Middle and Southern states the shift was longer. 

The rebellion against long hours of toil began, in 
fact, before the industrial revolution. In 1791 the 
Journeymen Carpenters of Philadelphia struck against 
the master carpenters. By agreement they decided: 
"That in the future, a Day's Work amongst us, shall 
be deemed to commence at six o'clock in the morning 
and terminate at six in the evening of each day." f 
This demand for a twelve-hour day in place of the 
shift from sun to sun seems, albeit, to have been re- 
ceived with no more favor in 1791 than the eight-hour 
day is accorded by many employers at present. The 
movement for the shorter work day was historically 
an attempt of a politically and socially disfranchised 
class to obtain leisure and comfort. During the early 
decades of the nineteenth century the political fran- 
chise was extended to men who had previously been 
without vote. They found, however, that without 
education they were hardly able to utilize the political 
power which seemed to have been bestowed upon them. 
Consequently they passionately sought education and 

* "History of Labor in the United States," 1 : 172. 
t Op. cit. t 1 : 69. 



Hours 97 

the leisure which is prerequisite to learning. "Must 
a man, because he is poor and a mechanic, go through 
the drudgery of day labor in the hot and weary days 
of midsummer without respite?" asked the Boston 
Transcript in 1832.* Answering its own question, 
the paper continued : "But let the mechanic's labor be 
over when he has wrought ten or twelve hours in the 
long days of summer and he will be able to return to 
his family in season and with sufficient vigor, to pass 
some hours in the instruction of his children or in the 
improvement of his own mind." 

The character of the opposition to the ten-hour 
day at that time was set forth by the merchants and 
shipowners of Boston during the ship carpenters' 
strike of 1832, when they said in an address to the 
public that "the time thus proposed to be thrown away 
would be a serious loss to this active community" and 
"the habits likely to be generated by this indulgence 
in idleness in our summer mornings and afternoons 
will be very detrimental to the journeyman individu- 
ally and very costly to us as a community." They 
feared also that if the carpenters obtained the ten-hour 
day the example "will probably be followed by thou- 
sands who are now contentedly and industriously 
pursuing their avocations, and thus produce incal- 
culable injury to the whole people." The essence of 
their reasoning was to be found in the fact that the 
merchants and shipowners, who, as representatives of 
the property holders, had always governed Massachu- 
setts, could not understand that common working men 

* February 20, 1832 ; quoted in "History of Labor in the United 
States," 1 : 324. 



98 Industry and Human Welfare 

were rising to a new status. They feared also that if 
the carpenters secured their demand the factory 
workers would be disquieted and the long day there too 
would be jeopardized. 

It is significant of the industrial development of this 
country that the first protests against the long working 
day came not from the employees of factories but from 
the members of old crafts, who developed trade union 
organization. The New York City bakers * thus in 
1 82 1 led a movement for the abolition of Sunday work 
in their trade. Members of the building trades were 
prominent in the earlier campaigns for the shortening 
of the work day, as in recent years they have been 
conspicuous among the beneficiaries of the movement. 
Occasionally there were stirrings among the factory 
girls of New England or Pennsylvania, but the agita- 
tion for shorter hours was chiefly in the hands of 
social reformers and of trade unionists who did not 
represent workers in factories. Steadily throughout 
the nineteenth century the demand for a shortening 
of hours of labor, however, grew in strength. The 
progress of legislation regulating the hours of labor 
of women and children employed in industry has been 
touched in a previous chapter. f As early as 1832 the 
New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and 
Other Workmen pointed out that since "a large pro- 
portion of the operatives in our factories are and must 
continue to be a helpless population, it is indispensable 
that they be put under the unremitted supervision and 

♦"History of Labor in the United States," 1:162; quoting 
American Federationist, XX: 518. 
t Chapter III. 



Hours 99 

protection of the law of the land." The factory owners 
who through tariffs and by other devices had so consis- 
tently sought and obtained the protection of the law for 
themselves were able to thwart this and similar efforts 
to extend the protection of the state to factory workers. 
In time, however, the organized trade unionists, hav- 
ing created the American Federation of Labor, and 
having adopted a new philosophy, decided against the 
policy of seeking a shortening of their own working 
day by legal enactment. The unionists preferred to 
obtain their demands by direct negotiations with their 
employers, on the theory that progress in that manner 
would strengthen their organization while legislative 
aid might weaken unionism. Since May i, 1886, the 
eight-hour day has been one of the primary objectives 
of the American Federation of Labor.* 

The argument for the shorter working day has 
changed in form through succeeding generations, but 
essentially it has been the same. The negative argu- 
ment has been the need to protect workers against the 
physically devastating effects of too long hours of 
work. On the positive side the goal has been to pro- 
vide enough free time to enable workers to develop as 
normal human beings. As long as the great majority 
of workers were disfranchised it mattered little to the 
state whether they possessed the unoccupied time in 
which to become intelligent citizens. Disfranchised 
folk need not think about public affairs. But that posi- 
tion no longer applied when universal manhood and 
womanhood suffrage obtained. More persuasive with 
the courts, when the short working day was under con- 
* "History of Labor in the United States," 2:376. 



ioo Industry and Human Welfare 

sideration, has been the health argument. This has 
been enormously developed by recent scientific re- 
searches.* In his introduction to Miss Goldmark's 
classic study Dr. Frederic S. Lee summed up the scien- 
tific attitude when he said : 

"Industrialism has been quick to accept the achieve- 
ments of science in inanimate things, but slow to recog- 
nize the teachings of physiology with regard to man 
himself. Methods and machines have been revolutionized 
but the human element has not been eliminated. The man 
or the woman or the child is still essential to the method 
and the machine, and while the inanimate agent demands 
more and more of him, his fundamental physiological 
powers are probably not so very different from what they 
were when he built the pyramids and made papyrus. He 
may sharpen his attention, shorten his reaction time, and 
develop manual skill; scientific management may step in 
and direct his powers more intelligently, but sooner or 
later his physiological limit is again reached on a new 
plane. Try as we will, we cannot get away from the 
fact that so long as machines need men, physiological 
laws must be reckoned with as a factor in industrialism." 

Fatigue is the new element which has entered the 
discussion of the short working day. The cause of 
fatigue is a toxin, f — the subject is still largely a terra 
incognita of science — which, unless eliminated by nor- 
mal rest, eventuates a number of evils, including dis- 
eases, accidents, economic waste, probably industrial 
unrest — if that be counted an evil — and possibly racial 
degeneration. The factory system was sought by the 
pioneers because it was "labor saving," and yet it has 
entailed new and more harassing strains than those 
ordinarily experienced under the old manual scheme 
of production. Among these Miss Goldmark pointed 

♦See "Fatigue and Efficiency," by Josephine Goldmark; "The 
Human Machine and Industrial Efficiency," by Frederic S. Lee. 
t "Fatigue and Efficiency," page n. 



Hours 101 

out speed, complexity, monotony, piece work and over- 
time, and such influences as noise and mechanical 
rhythms. The long day of agriculture was probably 
an evil. Certainly the last few generations have wit- 
nessed the efforts of millions in every industrial 
country to escape from country life. But harmful as 
twelve hours and more are in rural labor, their fatigu- 
ing effects are greatly accentuated in factories because 
of these new stresses of industrialism. Any one who 
has ever seen the inside of a textile factory, a machine 
shop, or even a telephone exchange, must be at least 
dimly aware of the increased intensity of work due to 
modern mechanical methods. The more progressive 
states and the labor unions have sought to mitigate 
this by establishing the eight-hour day, and some, with 
the Saturday half -holiday, have inclined to the forty- 
four hour week, while a rare pioneer has experimented 
with the six-hour day. Strictly from the standpoint 
of health there is perhaps no unvarying formula which 
may be applied. Dr. Lee, who on these matters is as 
well qualified as any, has said : 

"One is treading on dangerous ground if he attempts 
to predict an optimum working day without an analysis 
of the work itself. The fact is unmistakable, however, 
that most of the reliable evidence at present points toward 
an approximation of the eight-hour working day as 
affording for a considerable variety of occupations and 
for conscientious workers the best condition for high 
productivity." * 

American states have regulated the hours of labor 
for three different groups. f First of all, the working 

* "The Human Machine," page 36. 

t Harvard Law Review, Vol. 29, pages 353-373. by Felix 
Frankfurter. 



102 Industry and Human Welfare 

hours of women and children were shortened by legal 
enactment. Later, the hours of all workers employed 
in dangerous or peculiarly unhealthful employments 
were determined by the law; and finally, a beginning 
has been made toward the state regulation of the hours 
of work in industry generally. 

The state's right to interfere in behalf of workers 
has been grudgingly conceded by the courts after long 
struggles and many contradictory decisions. The pro- 
cedure in many of these cases has been extremely inter- 
esting. One of the historic episodes was the invalida- 
tion of an eight-hour law for women by the Illinois 
Supreme Court in 1895.* The court there held that 
the attempt of the state to protect women against a 
working day which the legislature thought to be dan- 
gerous to their health was a ' 'purely arbitrary restric- 
tion upon the fundamental right of the citizen to con- 
trol his or her own time and faculties." The suit which 
resulted in the annulment of the law was in fact 
brought, however, not by women who wished to work 
long hours but by paper box manufacturers who wished 
to employ them for longer periods than the law sanc- 
tioned. That method of attack upon legislation de- 
signed to safeguard wage earners has been thoroughly 
characteristic of the long struggle. Manufacturers who 
insisted upon protection for themselves by way of tariff 
measures and with other legal devices have continued 
to contest the right of their employees to the safeguards 
of the law and by an ironical extension of the prin- 
ciples of liberty have sued in the name of workers for 
a freedom which in fact was oppression. 
* Ritchie v. People, 155 Illinois 98. 



Hours 103 

For years after legislatures were first persuaded of 
the need to protect workers against hours of labor 
which jeopardized health, and which denied the leisure 
prerequisite to normal social and political life, the 
courts continued to offer a refuge for those employ- 
ers who by an amazing inversion of reality essayed to 
preserve for their employees such fictitious rights. 
Courts trailed legislatures. Now, however, the United 
States Supreme Court has in notable cases affirmed the 
power of legislatures to regulate working hours. The 
California Act, limiting the work of women in certain 
industries to forty-eight hours per week, was upheld 
by the Supreme Court, which thereby marked a period 
in this development.* One of the most significant 
aspects of this change in the positions taken by courts 
is to be found in the increasing reliance put upon scien- 
tific testimony concerning the actual consequences of 
industrial employment upon workers. The shift in 
method was manifested in the nature of the arguments 
offered by Louis D. Brandeis when the United States 
Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of the 
Oregon ten-hour law for women employed in any 
mechanical establishment, factory, or laundry. Courts 
previously had been relying on what was called "com- 
mon knowledge" concerning the effects of industry 
upon workers, as they applied the principle of the free- 
dom of contract and determined the application of the 
police power in these affairs. But it has been ob- 
served that this "common knowledge" was often 
"popular error," and accordingly in the Oregon litiga- 

* Miller v. Wilson, 236 U, S. 373 ; Bosley v. McLaughlin, 236 
U. S. 385. 



104 Industry and Human Welfare 

tion Mr. Brandeis — later Justice of the United States 
Supreme Court — assisted by Miss Josephine Gold- 
mark, publication secretary of the National Consum- 
ers' League, summarized the extant scientific literature 
upon the issue before the court in order to set forth 
what was in reality the world's experience.* Again in 
1 9 14, by similar reasoning, the United States Supreme 
Court sustained the Oregon ten-hour law for labor in 
factories.! Regulation of the hours of men's labor 
by legislation is developed far less than that for women. 
The explanation of this is to be found in the attitude 
of the American Federation of Labor, which has gen- 
erally opposed the state regulation of men's hours of 
labor because of the fear of weakening union organ- 
ization, and in the further fact that public opinion is 
not awake to the desirability of restricting men's hours 
of work. J 

One of the illuminating discoveries concerning the 
effects of fatigue has been that workers often produce 
more in a short working day than in a long one. The 
most interesting finding of this nature was obtained 
in consequence of an inquiry by the United States 
Public Health Service. Two plants, one working on 
the ten-hour system and the other using the eight- 
hour shift, were the basis of perhaps the most pains- 
taking study ever made in this field. In summary it 
was reported that "a comparison of the eight-hour 
and the ten-hour system leads to the conclusion that 
the eight-hour system is the more efficient." This 

* Miiller v. Oregon, U. S. 412, 1908. 

f Bunting v. Oregon, 243 U. S. 246, 37 Supreme Court 435, 1917. 

$ "Principles of Labor Legislation," 248. 



Hours 105 

greater efficiency was evidenced by a steady mainte- 
nance of output during the shorter day as contrasted 
with a declining output during the ten-hour day, the 
reduction of lost time to a minimum under the eight- 
hour system, and the prevalence of an artificial re- 
striction of output under the ten-hour system, and also 
by other data obtained in the course of the inquiry.* 

This conclusion, which is supported by some of the 
findings made by investigations carried on by the Brit- 
ish government, has been challenged by the National 
Industrial Conference Board, an organization of Amer- 
ican employers' associations. In a study entitled 
"Practical Experience with the Work Week of Forty- 
Eight Hours or Less," the Conference Board stated 
that more than 87 per cent of the plants which reported 
showed that a reduction of the work week to forty- 
eight hours or less was accompanied by a decrease in 
the weekly output per worker. It should be noted that 
the Conference Board merely asked questions of manu- 
facturers, while the United States Public Health Ser- 
vice made a long and scrupulous study of two estab- 
lishments using the eight-hour and the ten-hour shifts. 
The Board, however, drew attention to the fact that in 
many of the factories concerning which it made inquiry 
"the output was limited almost entirely by the speed 
of machines." In such a case it is inevitable that a 
reduction in running time be followed by a reduction in 
output. The Board gave support to the conclusions 
of the Public Health Service investigators, on the other 
hand, by reporting that where handwork predominated 

* Public Health Bulletin No. 106, page 26. Comparison of an 
Eight-Hour Plant and a Ten-Hour Plant. 



106 Industry and Human Welfare 

— that is, where the human worker was more nearly 
free to express himself — "it was possible to increase 
the hourly output of workers, in some cases to the ex- 
tent of entirely compensating for the loss in working 
time or even of exceeding the previous weekly pro- 
duction." 

It is impossible to say generally whether the eight- 
hour day, so long the goal of union labor and social 
reformers, is economically more productive than the 
longer working day. Experience seems to differ wide- 
ly. It must, albeit, be remembered that the public 
argument for the short working day is not grounded 
in the belief that men and women and children produce 
more in eight hours than in nine or ten or twelve. It 
does not matter from the standpoint of social states- 
manship whether eight hours produce more or less than 
ten or twelve. As a consequence of the experience 
of this country in the war incidentally it became appar- 
ent that, given the motive, the productive capacity of 
the country could be enormously increased without 
condemning industrial workers to live in evil condi- 
tions. Enough can be produced. The need to shorten 
hours arises from the necessities of workers as indi- 
viduals and as members of the community. Normal 
family life is not to be attained when men and women 
pour all their energies into the tasks of industrial pro- 
duction. No more are men and women stripped by toil 
of every resource of intelligence and energy able to 
share in the social and political activities of a free re- 
public. The feeling of the public in this matter was 
stated by the President's Industrial Conference in its 
report of March, 1920, as follows: 



Hours 107 

"The problem of hours has undergone a fundamental 
change through the introduction of large scale factory- 
production and the growing concentration of our popu- 
lation in cities. Men and women can work relatively 
long hours at work which is interesting, which calls upon 
their various energies, which gives some opportunity for 
creative self-expression. Work which is repetitive, 
monotonous and conducted under the confining indoor 
conditions of even the best industrial plant, especially 
where the plant is located at a distance from the homes 
of the workers, makes much more exacting physical and 
nervous demands. If the inevitable conditions of mod- 
ern industry do not offer variety and continuing interest, 
the worker should have hours short enough for more 
recreation and for greater contact with his fellow work- 
men outside of working hours."* 

The changes made subsequent to the Armistice have 
been so widespread that it is difficult to estimate cor- 
rectly what are the prevailing hours of labor in Amer- 
ican industry. In the highly organized trades the 
eight-hour day generally obtains. This is character- 
istic of the mines, of the railroads — except in the 
operation of trains — and of the building industry. In 
the manufacturing industries only slightly affected by 
unionism the nine- and ten-hour working days are 
popular. In a few trades such as the men's clothing 
industry the forty-four hour week has been established. 
Some light was thrown on the question of working 
hours by an industrial survey made by the United 
States Bureau of Labor Statistics during the first 
months of 1919^ In the twenty-eight industries 
studied it was reported that for the payroll period in- 
vestigated the average hours worked per day were 7.6 

* Report of the Industrial Conference called by the President, 
'March 6, 1920, pages 32 and 33. 

t Industrial Survey in Selected Industries in the United States, 
1919, Bulletin No. 265, U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 



108 Industry and Human Welfare 

hours for male workers and 7.5 hours for female 
workers. But this average reveals almost nothing of 
the normal working day in any industry, for the reason 
that the total number of hours worked by an individual 
during a week was divided by the number of days and 
the result was given as the average. This took no ac- 
count of lost time. A man might have been employed 
twelve hours a day for the three days during which 
work was given him and his average would have been 
six hours daily, a totally misleading indication of his 
real routine. This is shown by the tables given for 
individual industries and processes, where the average 
working time varies widely. Ethelbert Stewart, 
United States Commissioner of the Labor Statistics, 
used to quote a colored preacher whose children were 
afflicted with badly deformed legs. Some were bowed 
inward and some outward. But the sensitive preacher 
resented sympathy and argued that his children's legs 
averaged as well as any. So, too, do the working 
hours of the establishments covered in this extensive 
industrial survey. But the individuals are not bettered 
by that. Male blowers in the blast furnaces of the 
Eastern district were thus shown to have been em- 
ployed 13.9 hours on the average during the period 
studied while male door operators employed in the 
open-hearth furnaces of the same industry on the 
Pacific Coast averaged only 7.2 hours a day. With 
such variations it means little to say that the male em- 
ployees of the iron and steel industry in the United 
States were employed, during the short time investi- 
gated, 7.8 hours per week day. 

The last great industry which has retained the long 



Hours 109 

working day of a century ago is steel. The twelve- 
hour day and the seven-day week as recently as the 
spring of 1921 have measured the working periods 
exacted of a large number of the employees of the steel 
industry.* In the study of the entire industry made 
by the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics in 191 1, it 
was found that nearly fifty per cent of the workers 
were employed on the twelve-hour shift. The study 
made by John A. Fitch during 1920 indicated that not 
much change had been made during the years following. 
In the spring of 1921 the United States Steel Corpora- 
tion announced that it hoped and expected the twelve- 
hour day would be abolished. 

Not less serious than the long working day is night 
employment. This existed from the very beginning 
of the factory system in this country and to some ex- 
tent before the mechanical revolution, but unlike the 
twelve-hour day it was not borrowed from agricul- 
ture. In the draft of his proposal for the establish- 
ment of a powder factory in the United States, in 1801, 
E. I. du Pont mentioned to his French backers that 
four powder mills then in operation in Pennsylvania 
worked night and day.f Night work has grown 
greatly with the factory system. In some so-called con- 
tinuous industries, such as certain steel processes, it 
is perhaps inescapable. In the steel industry it has, 
however, been accompanied by enormously long hours 
of work. Often the men on the night shift have been 
engaged thirteen hours, while those on the day work 

* See The Survey, March 5, 1921, page 783 and following, 
t E. I. duPont de Nemours & Company, page 168. 



no Industry and Human Welfare 

were employed eleven. Night work in itself is a ser- 
ious menace to health. 

Admitting the probable necessity of night work un- 
der various circumstances, Dr. Lee insists that: 

"It should be borne in mind that from the standpoint 
of the human machine night work is always abnormal. 
Man is a diurnal, not a nocturnal, animal, and any at- 
tempt to change his innate habits in this respect are 
bound to interfere with his physiological processes. 
Man's body needs the stimulus of sunlight and is 
adapted to the atmospheric conditions of the day. Some 
of his physiological processes exhibit a regular curve 
of variation through the twenty-four hours, one of the 
best known being that of bodily temperature, with its 
gradual rise during the day to a maximum in the late 
afternoon, and a gradual fall to a minimum in the early 
morning. 

"There is a general consensus of opinion that night 
work is more deleterious to health than is day work, 
and this opinion is supported by incontestable evidence; 
but at the present state of our knowledge it is hardly 
possible, nor indeed for our present purpose is it neces- 
sary, to differentiate between the deleterious effects per se 
resulting from such conditions as the attempted imposi- 
tion of an unphysiological rhythm and the lack of bene- 
ficial sunshine and the deleterious effects resulting from 
the fact that under our social conditions the day's re- 
cuperation of the night worker is rarely equal to the 
night's recuperation of the day worker. Night worV 
entails a diminution of sleep." * 

Most European industrial countries forbid night 
work for women and some American states have taken 
the same course, The first International Conference 
on Labor Legislation expressed the general conscience 
of the civilized world as follows : 

"Women, without distinction of age, shall not be 
employed during the night in any public or private 
undertaking or in any branch thereof, other than an 

* "The Human Machine and Industrial Efficiency," by Frederic 
S. Lee, pages 61 and 68. 



Hours in 

undertaking in which only members of the same family 
are employed." * 

Children are more generally safeguarded from the 
effects of night work, but so far almost nothing has 
been done in this country to protect men. 

The factory system also developed enormously the 
habits of Sunday work. In continuous industries seven 
days' work are not to be avoided. In other lines pub- 
lic convenience insists upon uninterrupted service. 
Transportation cannot now be stopped for Sabbath 
observance, although for a number of years the rail- 
roads did not operate on Sunday. In an estimate made 
in 1913 on the basis of reports made by the Massachu- 
setts, New York, Minnesota, and the United States 
Bureau of Labor Statistics, John A. Fitch reckoned, 
taking the entire country and including the non-indus- 
trial as well as the industrial population, that a total 
of over 4,500,000 people were engaged in seven-day 
labor. f Sunday work deprives this vast number of 
people of leisure and at the same time, through creat- 
ing excessive fatigue, is a menace to health. J The 
trade unions have in numerous instances sought laws 
providing one day's rest in seven. In the United States 
the federal government and six states had by January, 
1920, made enactments embodying this principle. Only 
the statutes of Massachusetts, New York, and Wiscon- 
sin apply to factories and mercantile establishments 
generally, and even these exclude numerous classes. 

* The American Labor Legislation Review, 9, page 535- 

t "Rest Periods for Continuous Industries." Op. cit., 3 : 53- 

t "The Human Machine and Industrial Efficiency," page 47- 



H2 Industry and Human Welfare 

The laws of the other states and of Congress on this 
subject are narrowly restricted. 

The early Sunday laws in this country, of which 
there were many, were designed to protect the Sabbath 
from man. The more recent laws have been aimed 
at the protection of man from industry. Both types 
have been sustained by the courts.* The practical con- 
sequence of such a law in the case of the really con- 
tinuous industries is to enlarge the working force by 
one-sixth so that all may have one free day a week 
and at the same time the establishment be kept fully 
manned. The advantage of a weekly day of rest even 
from the material standpoint of production was made 
apparent by the inquiries of the British Health of 
Munitions Workers' Committee, which in the midst of 
the war reported : 

"If the maximum output is to be secured and main- 
tained for any length of time, a weekly period of rest 
must be allowed. Except for quite short periods, con- 
tinuous work, in their view, is a profound mistake. On 
economic and social grounds alike this weekly period of 
rest is best provided on Sunday." t 

Machinery, the labor saving invention, thus through 
the exactK-iis it has levied upon human nature, has con- 
vinced public opinion of the need of shortening the 
hours of toil. During many decades, however, the dur- 
ation of work was not shortened by the factory sys- 
tem. Instead, to the long hours of agriculture were 
added night work and Sunday work. Now the tide 
has turned and while adequate leisure and even suffi- 

* "Principles of Labor Legislation," 1920 edition, page 278. 
t TJ. S. Bureau of Labor Statistic*, Bulletin 221, page 8. 



Hours 113 

cient rest for the great majority are objectives still to 
be realized, already science has provided the sanction 
and industry itself has supplied the means for the es- 
tablishment of a more wholesome and happier way of 
life. 



CHAPTER VI 

REGULARITY OF EMPLOYMENT 

Not less important in the lives of workers than the 
fatiguing and destructive effects of excessive and un- 
physiologic hours of labor, is the periodical denial of 
the opportunity to work at all. That is a distinct prod- 
uct of the mechanical revolution. Industry makes 
irregular demands for human labor. Seasonal needs, 
the cycles of business, changes within industries, 
these and other factors tend to make the employment of 
workers in industry seem to be almost capriciously un- 
certain, Unemployment for wage earners means a 
cessation of income and dire anxiety. Changing sea- 
sons and cycles of business are obviously, however, not 
new phenomena. "Manufacture" was irregular in its 
demand for workers before the first power factory 
was established. Business cycles were not unknown 
to the economic observers of the eighteenth century. 
Nevertheless, in reality machine industry did of itself 
give rise to the modern phenomenon of unemploy- 
ment. 

The explanation of this is in part to be found in 
the fact that the factory system demanded specializa- 
tion and a division of labor among its workers and 
that it segregated operatives in cities. As has been 
observed previously, early American artizans — in so 

"4 



Regularity of Employment 115 

far as they were freemen — were not dependent upon a 
single vocation. Tench Coxe described workers who 
were gardeners and small farmers when they were not 
following their trade. When the demand for shoes 
failed, the shoemaker, for instance, was not totally 
unemployed. He had other work. The produce of 
his garden, his chickens and pig and cow, the posses- 
sion of a home for which he paid little or no rent, 
gave him a security which his great-grandchildren en- 
tirely lack, unless they, too, dwell in small villages. 
"Hard times" oppressed the land long before factor- 
ies were founded, but the American laborer and 
mechanic was certain of shelter, of food, and of clothes, 
poor in quality as these often were. Poverty of course 
existed. Never, perhaps, has been the time when there 
were no poor, but it was chiefly the poverty of the 
sick, of the widowed, of the unfit. Enormous varia- 
tions in the opportunity to work did not then curse 
the great mass of the population. Agriculture, by 
which the overwhelming majority of the people lived, 
is seasonal, but in this country it knew little unemploy- 
ment. For most life passed at a low but unvarying 
level. Conditions were endured which would appear 
intolerable to-day to the descendants of those who were 
pioneers, but life was secure and if there was for the 
majority small hope of attaining ease there was less 
anxiety over sudden economic disaster or over the con- 
tinuance of life itself. 

Unemployment and the fear of unemployment are 
twin evils created by the factory system. Industry 
destroyed man's old sense of safety, and in the United 
States little has been done to make good this great 



n6 Industry and Human Welfare 

loss. The possibility of being workless and without 
income hangs over the great majority of wage earners. 
The factory worker of to-day knows only a fractional 
part of the trade he pursues. He knows little else that 
he could turn to account. He must live by his trade or 
not at all. In order to obtain employment he must 
ordinarily reside in congested cities, where the possi- 
bility of subsidiary means of support are denied him. 
Usually he does not own the house or the tenement he 
lives in. He neither cultivates nor harvests the vege- 
tables and fruits which his family consumes. If he is 
able to eat eggs or to drink milk he obtains these articles 
from dealers who are themselves far removed from the 
scene of actual production. His clothes are bought, not 
made at home. The modern factory worker must re- 
tain his job if he wishes to continue alive, and yet he 
knows from bitter experience that at recurrent inter- 
vals, regardless of zeal or fitness, many men and 
women will not be employed. His constant question is 
"Am I next to go?" That condition, unemployment 
and the more harassing dread of unemployment which 
it engenders, are among the most serious reproaches 
which the conscience of humanity must level at modern 
industry. 

The conventional attitude toward unemployment 
regards it as one of the inescapable evils of mankind. 
It seems to be a blight sent to distress the race, an ill 
inevitable because it appears to be the result of some 
obscure law of nature. That position, never rational, 
has now few informed defenders. In his distinguished 
book "Unemployment: A Problem of Industry," Sir 
^William H, Beveridge (page 14) made it apparent that 



Regularity of Employment 117 

unemployment is a normal and not an abnormal mani- 
festation of industry. Irregularity of production is a 
part of the expected routine. This conclusion is ren- 
dered plain enough by a consideration of the varying 
sums of the products of industry. Studies recently 
made show the fluctuations in the actual physical vol- 
ume of the products of American manufacturies during 
the years from 1899 to 1919. These decades were, on 
the whole, marked by tremendous expansion, but year 
by year there were violent ups and downs. The figures 
giving these variations are not merely indices of pro- 
duction. With as great vividness they show the course 
of employment and unemployment. As Professor Day 
points out, "The years 1902, 1905-7, 1912, 1916-17, 
were years of especially large production; 1900-01, 
1908, 191 1, 191 4, 191 9, years of particularly low pro- 
duction." * A tremendous slump in production oc- 
curred during 1908. This threw millions of men and 
women out of work. In his interesting attempt to 
reckon the ebb and flow of employment in American 
cities, Hornell Hart,f speaking of the period between 
1902 and 191 7, said: 

"The number of unemployed in cities of the United 
States (entirely omitting agricultural labor, for which no 
reliable data are now available) has fluctuated between 
1,000,000 and 6,000,000. The least unemployment oc- 
curred in 1906-1907 and in 1916-1917, while the most 
occurred in 1908 and in 1914 and 1915. The average num- 
ber unemployed has been two and a half million workers, 
or nearly ten per cent of the active supply." 

* Edmund E. Day, "The Review of Economic Statistics," 
January, 1921 ; page 20. 

t "Fluctuations in Employment in Cities of the United States, 
1902 to 1917," by Hornell Hart. Helen S. Trounstine Foundation, 
Cincinnati, Vol. 1, No. 2. 



n8 Industry and Hunum Welfare 

This conclusion is similar to the opinions of most 
students of the subject. The number of employees in 
New York state factories at the time of inspection 
were, for example, compiled for the years 1901 to 1909 
inclusive. Marked differences are found. The decade 
was one of remarkable growth but there was a large de- 
crease in employment during 1908. Fewer workers 
were employed in New York factories during 1909 
than during 1906. More than eleven per cent of the 
factory population, or 128,874 individuals, was thrown 
out of work in 1908.* These variations are charac- 
teristic. "We find in the industrial centers of this 
state," said the New York State Commission on Em- 
ployers' Liability and Unemployment of 191 1, "at all 
times of the year, in good times as well as in bad, 
wage earners able and willing to work who cannot 
secure employment." The Bureau of Labor Statistics 
study made during March and April, 191 5, showed 
that in sixteen Eastern and Middle Western cities 15 
per cent of the families having policies in the Metro- 
politan Life Insurance Company were suffering from 
unemployment. A similar study made during June 
and July, 19 14, in twelve Rocky Mountain and Pacific 
Coast cities had reported 15.3 per cent unemployed, a 
striking demonstration of how widespread the condi- 
tion of unemployment was during those years.f Unem- 
ployment by its undulations registers the movement of 
the business cycle, with its veering swings from pros- 
perity to depression. Industry may in time be stabil- 

* Report of New York State Commission on Employers' Lia- 
bility and Unemployment, Third Report, 191 1, page 4. 
t U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin 195. 



Regularity of Employment 119 

ized so that these cyclical fluctuations cease to deny 
the opportunity of work to millions, but for the imme- 
diate future at least this process must be expected to 
continue. At the beginning of 1921 the United States 
Employment Service sent out questionnaires and on 
the basis of the information thus obtained estimated 
that 5,000,000 wage earners were unemployed during 
the summer of 1921. The American Federation of 
Labor made a similar estimate. 

Not only do these cyclical fluctuations of business 
and industry deprive millions of the opportunity to 
work and to earn but there are also seasonal varia- 
tions in the demand for workers which result in an 
enormous burden of underemployment and unemploy- 
ment. Certain occupations are inherently seasonal. 
Agriculture is the perfect example, but better far than 
industry, agriculture, except in the harvest fields, cares 
for its own. The seasonal character of many industries 
diminishes the actual earnings of the people employed. 
The number of wage earners employed in the manu- 
facturing industries of the country varies greatly by 
months. The Census of 19 10* recites the figures for 
1909 and 1904. During 1909 Hornell Hart estimated 
that there were on the average 2,100,000 persons, ex- 
cluding agricultural workers, unemployed. The vari- 
ations for the months among those who had jobs were 
great. The census showed that November was the 
month of high employment. January was the low 
month. In November the manufacturing industries 
gave employment to approximately 800,000 more 
workers than in the preceding January. From month 
♦"Manufactures," Vol. 8, page 276. 



120 Industry and Human Welfare 

to month there were violent changes in the demand for 
workers. A difference of more than thirteen per cent 
marked fluctuating requirements of the manufactur- 
ing industries during 1909. During 1904, when ac- 
cording to the Hart reckonings 2,400,000 workers 
were on the average unemployed, the difference be- 
tween the high month and the low month, October 
and January in this year, was upwards of seven per 
cent. The census figures for principal industries show 
with even greater clarity the seasonal demands for 
human service and the accompanying unemployment. 
The iron and steel trade has been called the barometer 
of industry. During December, 1909, certain estab- 
lishments in this industry employed 283,629 workers. 
In March, however, nearly a quarter fewer, or only 
215,076 had been hired. In foundry and machine prod- 
ucts there was a difference of nearly twenty per cent 
in the number of those employed in January and De- 
cember. These, moreover, were the more stable indus- 
tries. Others showed very wide variations. Brick 
and tile manufactures employed 104,930 in July, 1909, 
but only 38,312 in January. Glass manufactures em- 
ployed 40,222 in July and 81,665 * n December. Feb- 
ruary, March, April and May are the heavy months 
in the tanning industry in New York.* Fluctuations in 
advertising reduce the sizes of newspapers and the 
numbers employed. These are not the extreme cases. 
The sugar and molasses industry, which shows the 
widest differences, employed only 3.5 per cent of the 
people in February who were on its payrolls in Novem- 

* New York State Commission on Employers' Liability and 
Unemployment, page 4. 



Regularity of Employment 12 1 

ber. These differences month by month are not ab- 
normal expressions. Seasonal demand is character- 
istic. Thus it happens that in fat years as well as in 
lean, there are week by week vast numbers of workers 
who are unable to secure employment. 

Industry is subject to other variations, not attribu- 
table to business cycles of prosperity and depression 
or to seasonal demands. Industries rise in importance 
and then go down. The experience of the war exem- 
plified this perfectly. When the Armistice came thou- 
sands of workers were engaged in making gas masks. 
Vast numbers were employed in other forms of the 
munitions manufactures. Suddenly the need for gas 
masks stopped and all those whose lives had been de- 
voted to that purpose were suddenly cast adrift. Less 
dramatically this process continually recurs. The 
automobile industry grew enormously during the 
decade ending in 19 10, but the census of that year 
showed 71 industries which decreased their labor force 
during the decade. This waxing and waning of pro- 
duction is one of the persistent facts of industrial 
organization. 

Unemployment and irregular employment result in 
low and variable earnings. The earnings of cotton 
mill workers, even during years when the factories 
work relatively regularly, vary widely. A family of 
six wage earners together thus earned $32.75 one week 
and the following week only $17.70.* The greatest 
irregularity of earnings was found to be experienced 
both in the Southern and Northern mills. The ex- 
perience of a Fall River family, consisting of three 

* "Woman and Child Wage Earners," Vol. 16, page 156. 



122 Industry and Human Welfare 

wage earners, epitomizes the situation. The period 
from May i, 1908, to April 30, 1909, was covered by 
the inquiry. During the first week of this period the 
joint earnings of this family were §J.66. The second 
week the total income was $2.30. The third week it 
had risen to $22.02. The last nine weeks of the year 
studied there was no income at all because there was 
no work. The average weekly income was $19.52, 
and the total for the year was $839.51.* The textile 
industry, however, is counted among the more stable. 
Figures obtained from New York trade unionists 
showed that on the average union workers were losing 
about a fifth of their normal earnings because of un- 
employment and underemployment, f Theoretically, 
for instance, stage hands at that time earned on the 
average $720 a year. Their actual average earnings 
were some $432 annually. Trade unionists in the 
clothing and textile trades worked at pay rates which 
normally would have produced an average income of 
$975.66 a year. The actual average was $710. 

This marked reduction of annual earnings is one 
of the outstanding consequences of irregular work. 
These decreases and the fluctuating earnings entail 
many serious consequences. Undernourishment of 
the worker and his family, harassing anxiety, enforced 
idleness and drifting — these are some of the influences 
which rack millions of workers. No more pathetic 
figure is to be found than the strong, skillful craftsman, 
eager for the opportunity to work and to earn, and 

* "Woman and Child Wage Earners," Vol. 16, page 246. 
t New York Commission on Employers' Liability and Unem- 
ployment, page 8. 



Regularity of Employment 123 

yet sentenced to idleness while his dependents suffer. 
The picture of such men skulking in their own homes 
after futile searches for employment, while their wives 
go out in pursuit of odd tasks as domestic servants in 
order to keep the family together and avoid the dread 
appeal for charity, is desolate beyond words. Pre- 
cariousness of existence for wage earners is one of 
the clear consequences of the industrial revolution. 
The premature work of children and the forced em- 
ployment of mothers — these, too, are the gifts of 
irregular industry. The strong endure anxiety and 
deprivation while the weak and the less fortunate are 
forced to seek public aid. Involuntary unemployment 
was a factor in the situation of more than one- fourth 
of the cases closed by the New York Charity Organ- 
ization Society during the year of the report of the 
New York State Commission on Unemployment of 
1911. 

Migratory and casual workers existed long before 
the factory system. In a certain sense, of course, the 
pioneers were themselves migratory workers.* Wan- 
dering gangs of navvies were employed clearing the 
forests in the South, digging canals and building 
levees,f at the very moment when the factory system 
was being developed. The itinerant Irishmen, inci- 
dentally, were counted of less economic value than the 
negroes owned on the plantations, and they fared far 
worse. Their status was assuredly lower than that 
of the casual who is to-day employed in building a 

*"One Thousand Homeless Men," by Alice Willard Solen- 
berger. 
f "American Negro Slavery," by W. B. Phillips, page 301. 



124 Industry and Human Welfare 

factory or a railroad. None the less, in a peculiar 
way modern industry has created a new class of 
wandering workers. Construction work, specialized 
agriculture, itself a by-product of modern industry and 
highly seasonal occupations, have enlarged this class of 
laborers who are employed from day to day and often 
only by the hour. The logging industry demands 
its casuals, as do the various branches of construction. 
In ordinary years thousands of workers pass many 
months of idleness in cheap hotels and lodging houses 
of the great cities. Seattle, Chicago, Kansas City, 
New York, are the great gathering places for this 
unfortunate class of semi-employed workers. 

The human cost of irregular employment is incal- 
culable. The purely economic loss is also enormous, 
as studies of "labor turnover" have shown.* In ad- 
dition to the direct cessations of employment, a constant 
change of workers adds its burdens to the waste of 
industry. Ninety shops in the New York cloak, suit 
and skirt industry employed on the average 1,435 
workers for the year ending July 31, 191 3, but during 
that time a total of 4,858 persons were hired. An 
incessant stream of workers passed through these estab- 
lishments. Various estimates of the incessant loss 
from labor turnover have been made. A study of costs 
of electric railway service showed that the expense of 
training a trainman on a Milwaukee electric railway 
was not less than $217.29. The Jeffrey Manufactur- 
ing Company reckoned that the cost of breaking in 
a new man averaged about $100. The Dennison Man- 
ufacturing Company reckoned the cost of replacing 

* "The Turnover of Factory Labor," by Sumner H. Slichter. 



Regularity of Employment 125 

experienced workers in its establishment at $50 each.* 
The amount of actual damage which inexperienced 
workers do combines with their smaller productivity 
to augment the cost of labor turnover from the stand- 
point of the employer. The difference in the accident 
rate of experienced and of inexperienced workers, 
as shown by a number of street railway studies, is 
great. The total cost to American industry of labor 
turnover must approximate a sum comparable to the 
German indemnity. The endless "hiring and firing/' 
an essential part of the insecurity of the present, af- 
fects workers in various ways. Earnings are stopped 
during the time of unemployment before a new job is 
obtained; the finding of work involves expense, and 
earnings are apt to be low while the new tasks are 
learned. In addition the worker is demoralized by 
the constant shifting. 

The unending movement of men and women in and 
out of establishments is in part the cause and in part 
the result of a constant excess of workers. A group 
of woolen mills employing between 11,000 and 13,000 
hired 18,214 workers in 1907; in 1908, 12,932; in 
1909, 18,225 ; in 1910, 15,188, the size of the force, as 
Mr. Slichter has pointed out, undergoing relatively 
little change during these years. This turnover is the 
motion which measures the extent of the reservoir of 
labor. Exclusive of farm laborers this unemployed 
reserve ranges year by year from one million to six 
million workers, according to the reckonings of Hor- 
nell Hart. The army of available workers is increased 

*"The Turnover of Factory Labor," by Sumner H. Slichter, 
page 132. 



126 Industry and Human Welfare 

through immigration. The migration of European 
peoples to the United States has been largely an ill- 
regulated response to America's industrial demands. 
In part it has been a movement stimulated by employ- 
ers of labor, who have generally been discontented 
with the higher level of wages paid in this country. 
Immediately after the Civil War, for example, the 
American Emigrant Society was organized to supply 
American employers with imported workers. The ex- 
pression of the purpose of this original society was 
more frank than is now customary. An employer de- 
siring workers had only to make his needs known. The 
company charged a fee of $i on application for work- 
ers and on their delivery charged $10 for each skilled 
worker, $6 each for agricultural workers, $5 each for 
house servants and $5 each for boys learning a trade.* 
Congress was induced as early as the Civil War period 
so to frame laws as to attract immigrants to this 
country. The history of most of the great industries 
is a history of successive waves of immigration. 

Real need for workers to man the growing industrial 
establishments has competed with the desire of em- 
ployers to have a full reserve of labor. From the days 
of the American Emigrant Society until the Immigra- 
tion Act of 192 1 was passed there was no break in 
this effort to pour new workers into the reservoir of 
American industry, f Between July 1, 1900, and June 
1, 1918, 14,298,018 immigrants came into this country; 

♦"Social and Industrial Conditions in the North During the 
Civil War," by Emerson David Fite, page 192. 

t Statements of Inter-racial Council, 1920, estimating a need 
of 4,000,000 additional workers in the United States and urging 
renewed immigration from Europe. 



Regularity of Employment 127 

and yet, as Professor Lescohier has observed, in every 
day and month when these millions were coming idle 
men and women have vainly sought work in every city 
and town of the United States.* This reserve labor 
has rendered employment irregular at all times for 
many; it has kept earnings low for the reason that 
the law of supply and demand steadily operated against 
wage-earners — once the free lands were exhausted, re- 
moving the competition which the early manufacturers 
had faced ; and it has increased the sum of unemploy- 
ment during hard times. "Extra" workers are the 
characteristic expression of a system of industry which 
demands a supply of idle men and women to be held in 
waiting for the time of maximum production. In the 
cotton mills work is irregular, among other reasons, 
because ordinarily there have been more workers than 
jobs. Consequently, as previously noted, the average 
weekly income of the worker is seldom or never the 
same, and the Commissioner of Labor was impelled to 
report to the United States Senate in 191 1, following 
the investigation at Fall River, Massachusetts, that "in 
the entire study there was not one individual found 
whose earnings were sufficient to support a normal 
family according to the fair standard." 

The measures proposed to deal with the numerous 
evils and maladjustments summed up in the term ir- 
regular employment are many. They are of three 
varieties — ameliorative, informational, and preventive. 
Until comparatively recently, little statistical data con- 
cerning employment in the United States existed and 
even now precise information is available only for a 
* "The Labor Market," by Don S. Lescohier, page 9. 



128 Industry and Human Welfare 

few states and cities at specified intervals. The great 
effort has been to obtain facts so that on a diagnosis of 
reality valid social statesmanship might be built. The 
only sound means of obtaining a continuing picture of 
the fluctuations of employment are to be found in the 
establishment of a public employment service. For 
public employment offices serve the dual function of 
connecting workers with opportunities for employment 
and of obtaining current knowledge concerning the de- 
mand for workers and the supply of those in search 
of employment. In this country the national labor 
exchanges of Great Britain have been the general 
model although opinions differ as to whether the work 
should be done by the states or by the federal govern- 
ment. Prior to the World War the United States had 
made no real effort to create an employment service. 
During the summer of 191 8 the United States Em- 
ployment Service was established. The primary object 
of the organization was to supply workers to the war 
industries, and when the war was over Congress re- 
duced the service to impotence. It marks a begin- 
ning, however, and through the stimulus it gave to 
state and municipal employment offices, advanced 
greatly the idea of a system of public employment ex- 
changes. Valuable contributions to the knowledge of 
employment conditions in this country were obtained 
through the federal service,* especially of the waste in- 
volved in a hapless distribution of migratory workers 
to the harvest fields. The public employment service, 
whether national, state, or municipal, is of value also 

* See Annual Reports of the Director General, U. S. Employ- 
ment Service. 



Regularity of Employment 129 

in that it removes the heavy toll exacted by private 
employment agencies upon those seeking work. The 
tax upon the opportunity to earn, levied by those who 
make a commodity of jobs, has been a serious evil in 
the industrial life of the nation. 

The establishment of public employment offices has 
been the first long step in the abolition of unemploy- 
ment, for although an employment service cannot in- 
crease the sum of work in existence at any time, it does 
render more available the existing jobs and it sup- 
plies data on which policies may be built. The methods 
used to regularize industry and so to modify fluctua- 
tions in employment differ according to the industry. 
From the standpoint of the public the most promising 
program has been that of postponing public works from 
times of prosperity to seasons of depression.* In a few 
cities and states the policy of deferring public im- 
provements until hard times, in the belief that such 
a policy would tend to mitigate some of the effects of 
the depression, has been developed. This program 
calls for foresight but it involves no extraordinary ex- 
penditures on the part of the public. Unnecessary im- 
provements are not undertaken, but needed work is 
postponed and reserved for the time of want. 

Industries, and especially individual firms, have in 
places made efforts to stabilize employment and to 
create unemployment insurance funds. One of the 
first instances of this* in the United States was the ex- 
periment made by a Boston shoe factory, where pre- 
viously workers had been employed on an average about 
100 days a year. By means of a selling campaign and 
* See The Survey for January 8, 1921, page 530. 



130 Industry and Human Welfare 

through other devices the demand for shoes was more 
widely distributed throughout the year. A Cleveland 
clothing firm also was conspicuously successful in stab- 
ilizing the production of clothes. The Dennison Man- 
ufacturing Company, of Framingham, Massachusetts, 
has also been a notable pioneer in the stabilization of 
employment. The method used in this case was to de- 
velop certain standard articles which could be manufac- 
tured far in advance of their time of sale. Efforts are 
now being made to devise a system of removing irreg- 
ularity from the coal industry. The country was 
shocked in the autumn of 191 9 when the United Mine 
Workers in the bituminous fields demanded a six-hour 
day and a five-day week. The demand seemed less 
preposterous, however, when it was learned that never 
in the history of the industry had the miners had the 
opportunity to work as many days and hours as their 
demand involved.* By the development of storage and 
marketing facilities and in other ways it is possible 
for the more intelligent industrial manager largely to 
reduce irregular employment. Detailed suggestions 
were formulated for a number of industries by the 
President's Conference on Unemployment during Oc- 
tober, 1 92 1, and an interesting proposal for modifying 
the extremes of the business cycle was offered. 

Less intelligent and more selfish employers have, how- 
ever, little native interest in the human consequences 
of underemployment and unemployment and conse- 
quently it is not possible to rely solely upon the initia- 
tive of the managers of industry. Methods have to be 
devised both to stimulate employers to reduce un- 
• * See The Survey for November 22, 1919, page 151. 



Regularity of Employment 131 

employment and to relieve the necessities of those for 
whom work is not provided. One of the most interest- 
ing attempts to create stimuli of this character was ex- 
pressed in a bill introduced in the Wisconsin legisla- 
ture during 1921. This measure frankly was modeled 
on the insurance principle which has been found useful 
in the reduction of work accidents. Each industry and 
each business would by this proposal be compelled to 
insure against unemployment just as insurance against 
industrial accidents is now exacted. Workers actually 
unemployed would be given relief in accordance with 
the familiar principles of the British unemployment 
system. The insurance rate which the individual con- 
cern would pay would be based on the risk it presented. 
The natural desire of the insurer to reduce the pre- 
miums would accordingly induce him to endeavor to 
decrease unemployment in his own establishment. The 
Wisconsin bill would create a board competent to 
advise individual establishments concerning the most 
effectual means of stabilizing production and employ- 
ment.* 

The goal to be reached is the elimination of irregular 
work or, at least, of irregular income. The road to 
be traveled is plain and still the distance to be over- 
come is great. Consequently during the future, im- 
mediate and perhaps distant, much reliance must be 
found in a system of unemployment insurance. Great 
Britain has in this field the largest amount of expe- 
rience. In this country neither the individual states 
nor the United States have actually created unemploy- 
ment insurance systems although a growing public 

* See The Survey for March 19, 1921, page 880. 



132 Industry and Human Welfare 

opinion supports the proposal. Every individual has 
in American theory hitherto been able to provide per- 
sonally against the irregularities of work. The long 
rolls of the charity organization societies during 
times of depression show how fallacious that assump- 
tion has been. Nor is the belief that trade unions 
are able adequately to assure their members against 
unemployment well founded. Out of m national 
organizations affiliated with the American Federation 
of Labor only the Cigar Makers* Union has developed 
an extensive national system of unemployment insur- 
ance.* It is inconceivable that workers as individuals 
or as members of trade unions should be able to pro- 
vide adequate insurance against the emergency of un- 
employment. Earnings are too low and too irregular 
to sanction such a hope. 

Unemployment must be relieved by the agency 
which created large-scale industry. Each industry 
must bear its own burden. The government which 
has so consistently aided the managers and owners of 
the factory system must give its own guidance and 
direction to the healing of this chronic disease of con- 
temporary civilization. The belief of practical states- 
men on- this matter, so long neglected in the United 
States, was clearly expressed by the first International 
Labor Conference held under the auspices of the 
League of Nations at Washington, during 1919, in 
the recommendation that every member nation of the 
league establish "an effective system of unemployment 
insurance, either through a government system or 
through a system of government subvention to asso- 
* "Principles of Labor Legislation," page 442. 



Regularity of Employment 133 

ciations whose rules provide for the payment of bene- 
fits to their unemployed members." Insurance will 
not of itself eradicate unemployment, but it may sup- 
ply the stimulus to action without which relief might 
be indefinitely postponed. The resources with which 
to provide for the needs of the individuals unemployed 
are abundant. Through mechanical industry society 
has been enabled to produce more than can be con- 
sumed normally. ' The factory system has with its 
storehouses brought a security to society. But the 
individual worker has not been permitted to share in 
this cessation from anxiety concerning positive want. 
Statesmanship surely owes to the workers whose ef- 
forts have made possible the creation and the accumu- 
lation of material possessions, so characteristic of mod- 
ern society, a program of remedial action which will 
render economic security a common possession. 



CHAPTER VII 



HAZARDS OF INDUSTRY 



Industrial accidents and diseases are, paradoxically 
speaking, among the most hopeful indications of the 
factory system. This is true because the recent neces- 
sity to pay — even though inadequately — for the dam- 
age done workers by industry has showed the almost 
unsuspected potentialities of social control. Insur- 
ance against work accidents gave, and continues to give, 
enormous impetus to a positive movement for safety. 
This effort to achieve safety by avoiding the condi- 
tions which result in mishaps has foreshadowed the 
range of society's power to determine an environment. 
Workmen's compensation laws created the force which 
induced men to seek to discover ways of reducing the 
frequency of accidents. The insurance rates paid so 
vary that the factory which is safe for workers had 
low premiums, while a dangerous plant must pay 
highly for its hazards. This money stimulus has be- 
come a genuine incentive whose social product is the 
modern safety movement. Humanitarianism has 
also, of course, been a factor in the prevention of acci- 
dents, but the superior influence has been the insurance 
rating. 

The development of industry greatly increased the 
number and variety of work accidents and diseases, 

134 



Hazards of Industry 135 

although industrial hazards existed long before ma- 
chinery was first put to work. Seafaring, fishing, 
pioneering, historically were conspicuously dangerous 
enterprises. The work of laborers on canals and public 
roads and in other large-scale construction was tre- 
mendously costly in human health and life. It has 
been observed that wandering gangs of navvies were 
at times hired to perform heavy labor in the South 
because the owners of negro slaves were unwilling to 
risk their property at such dangerous labor. Service 
in the line of duty maimed and killed men a hundred 
years ago, or thousands of years ago for that matter, 
but the injuries done were probably less frequent or 
less obvious than those which result from present-day 
industry. At any rate, the situation gave rise to no 
considerable body of literature. Until recent years, 
moreover, accidents suffered or diseases developed in 
the course of employment were purely individual dis- 
asters for which neither employers nor the state were 
legally responsible. The hazards of the sea were tra- 
ditional. A mishap there to a man or a ship was 
euphemistically termed "an act of God" by way of in- 
dicating possibly the lack of legal liability which the 
owner of the vessel felt for the victims of the disaster. 
Traveling even on land was extremely dangerous. To 
go from New York to Charleston in 1800 was as risky 
as exploration of remote regions of the world to-day. 
Workmen suffered injuries in the course of employ- 
ment, but during the early years of the republic, in- 
stead of compensating for their trouble the state was 
more inclined to punish them for their misfortunes. 
About the time the factory system was getting its 



136 Industry and Human Welfare 

roots well planted in this country, the jails were filled 
with debtors. Upwards of a thousand were in the 
New York bridewell during the course of a single year. 
The man who was injured and who suffered unem- 
ployment thereafter almost inevitably fell into debt. 
Society had no mercy for him. If an unfriendly cred- 
itor chose to have him imprisoned, such a victim of 
industry had no other recourse but to go to jail. The 
hundred years and more which have bounded the in- 
dustrial revolution have also measured a complete 
change in public sentiment so far as these matters are 
involved. The change is probably due in no small 
way to the fact that the workers, unenfranchised a cen- 
tury ago, have now risen to a new political and social 
status, in which they refuse to endure the iniquities 
of the former era. 

Until 1837 the legal relationship between an em- 
ployer and an employee did not differ from the rela- 
tionship between strangers. No especial liability for 
injuries to his workmen was borne by an employer. 
"If A was hurt solely by B's neglect (and not by his 
own fault), B was bound to compensate A whether A 
was an employee or not." * As industry was created 
in larger units, and as man's safety became more de- 
pendent on the conduct of others over whom he had no 
control, the menace of industrial accidents became in- 
creasingly recognized. The old common law principles 
suggested by the legal rules of contributory negligence, 
fellow servant's negligence, and the assumption of risk 
became inadequate. Men began to see that just as 

* First Report New York Commission on Employen' liability, 
1910, page 11. 



Hazards of Industry 137 

unemployment was a witness of the fact that industry 
is irregular in its demand for human service, so, too, 
industry year by year inflicts a certain number of in- 
juries and deaths upon those employed. The imper- 
sonal system of production, and not a fellow worker, 
became in the eyes of the public and finally in the minds 
of the legislators and courts the moving cause of the 
injury. Having understood this, the public followed 
its logic and began to create a system of insurance 
against work accidents designed to lift a part of the 
burden inflicted by industry from the shoulders of 
the wage earners. This principle has been widely ac- 
cepted in the United States and very interesting prac- 
tical consequences have followed from it. The 
Illinois Supreme Court has, for example, lately held 
that a heat stroke may be an industrial accident within 
the meaning of the state compensation act. An en- 
gineer employed at a municipal pumping station died 
on a very hot day from heat stroke. The excessive 
heat of the engine was declared to be a contributory 
cause of the man's death and compensation was paid. 
Another recent case involved a man who was killed by 
one of his fellow workers. The fact that the killing 
occurred during the course of employment brought 
the episode within the scope of the compensation law 
and induced the court to uphold the payment of in- 
surance to the widow.* 

The change marked by such decisions as these is one 
of the most notable in the history of the United States. 
It is doubtful whether any new policy was so rapidly 

* Proceedings of the Casualty Actuarial and Statistical Society 
of America, November, 1920, page 112. 



138 Industry and Human Welfare 

accepted once a beginning of success had been at- 
tained. The first permanent compensation legislation 
was enacted by Washington and Kansas on March 
14, 191 1. Wisconsin, whose law was the first to be- 
come effective, acted on May 3, 191 1. Within the 
decade following 42 states and 3 territories have en- 
acted workman's compensation statutes and the United 
States government has amended the federal act to 
include all civil employees.* The rapidity of this de- 
velopment was almost revolutionary but the causes 
which produced it were great. A familiar comparison 
collates the number of those killed and injured by in- 
dustry and by wars. Cumulatively, the casualties of 
industry are incomparably more numerous. Frederick 
L. Hoffman reckoned that the probable approximate 
number of fatal accidents among American wage 
earners during 19 13 could be conservatively placed at 
25,000 and the number of injuries involving disability 
of more than four weeks at 700,000. f This was the 
estimate of an insurance statistician. One of the most 
recent accountings is that of the American Red Cross.} 
A study of insurance tables and of government figures 
led to the conclusion that industrial accidents now 
cause the deaths of more than 22,000 persons annually 
in the United States. Of every 10,000 Americans em- 
ployed during 1918, seven were killed. The fatalities 
in industry during that year alone thus were forty- 
five per cent of the number of Americans killed in 

* Comparison of Workmen's Compensation Laws of the U. S. 
and Canada, by Carl Hookstadt, Bulletin 275, U. S. Bureau of 
Labor Statistics. 

t U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin 157, page 6. 

% American Red Cross News Release, June 5, 1921. 



Hazards of Industry 139 

battle during the World War. The number of serious 
injuries suffered in the course of service is appallingly 
large. During 1919, for example, the American Red 
Cross calculated that some 3,400,000 disabilities due 
to industrial accidents were suffered by workmen and 
that during the year over 680,000 workers were laid 
up for four weeks or longer from non- fatal industrial 
accidents. The reckoning of the Red Cross was re- 
duced to the following table, showing the number of 
industrial accidents resulting in death during 1918 : * 

Industrial Accident Deaths in the United States, 1918. 

Men Total Rate per 10,000 
Industry Group Employed Accidents Employed 

Total 30,106,256 21,356 7.1 

Coal Mining 762,425 2,580 33.8 

Metal Mining 182,606 646 33.4 

Iron and Steel Employees 527,150 603 11.4 

Quarries 68,332 125 18.3 

Smelting (not iron) and 

Ore Dressing 61,708 77 12.5 

Steam and Street Rail- 
ways 1,839,229 3,S69 194 

Fisheries 67,036 201 30.0 

Navigation 147,478 457 31.0 

Lumber Industry 635,638 953 15.0 

Building 2413,283 3,039 12.5 

Watchmen, Police, etc.. . 176,974 133 7.5 

Telephone and Telegraph 134,071 67 5.0 

Electricians 134,071 102 22.5 

Draymen, Teamsters, etc. 407,557 408 10.0 

Agriculture 10,613,083 3,7*5 3-5 

Manufacture 5,145,656 1,286 2.5 

Other Employed Males. . 6,789,939 3,395 5.0 

This estimate is subject to the criticism applicable 

to all attempts to portray precisely the general situation 

in this country. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics 

has pointed out, the records of deaths and injuries are 

* Estimates based on the U. S. Labor Statistics Reports and 
accident rates of large industrial groups in insurance companies. 



140 Industry and Human Welfare 

so variously tabulated by different state authorities 
that it is difficult, if not impossible, to combine state 
reports with any certainty that the sum will be statis- 
tically exact.* For single industries and individual 
states, however, the facts are well known. Accidents 
in coal mining are, for example, reported by the Bureau 
of Mines, while railroad casualties are recorded by the 
Interstate Commerce Commission. Uniform reporting 
by the states is prerequisite to an adequate compre- 
hension of the full implications of industrial accidents, 
but even now the situation has been explored sufficient- 
ly to render plain the things which must be done in 
order to repair in so far as is possible the damage in- 
flicted. Nothing obviously requites a man for the 
loss of a hand or a leg or an eye, or of his skill. Still 
less can money make good the loss of a life. But in- 
surance can compensate in part for the money losses 
which result from industrial accidents. 

At the last survey it was reported that about sev- 
enty per cent of the employees of the country were 
protected by compensation insurance. About eight 
million employees, including agricultural laborers, are 
not covered by such insurance, and in addition to these 
about 1,400,000 interstate railway employees are with- 
out protection. Agricultural workers are scarcely pro- 
tected at all, despite the fact that while their rate of 
casualty is low the absolute number of deaths due to 
farming pursuits is estimated to be greater than that 
attributable to any other division of labor. f The de- 

* Monthly Labor Review, January, 1921, page 159. 

t Comparison of Workmen's Compensation Laws of the United 
States and Canada, up to January, 1920, by Carl Hookstadt, 
page 33- 



Hazards of Industry 141 

gree of protection accorded by the laws of various 
states also differs widely. Although no two states have 
identical compensation provisions, Mr. Hookstadt has 
pointed out that two factors generally operate in de- 
termining the amounts to be paid. These are the loss 
of earning capacity suffered and the resultant social 
need. The old conception of punitive damages which 
was involved in the common law has been completely 
wiped out. Compensation plans, ignoring the moral 
question of negligence, seek impersonally to provide 
for contingencies which may be foreseen. The actual 
scale, varying with the degree and duration of the 
disability suffered, is usually based on the earning 
capacity of the injured worker. It ranges from 50 
to 66 2/3 per cent of the wages paid at the time of 
the accident. 

In all of the United States, except in a few Southern 
states, workmen's compensation is now well estab- 
lished. Many of the laws are inadequate, but the prin- 
ciple has at least been asserted. Provision against in- 
dustrial disease is much less advanced. In many ways 
industry gives rise to disease among workers. Specific 
poisons, such as lead compounds, are absorbed and pro- 
duce disability, disease, and even death. Physical con- 
tact with other classes of substances result in specific 
affections, such, for example, as anthrax. Fumes and 
dust incident to work eventuate in tuberculosis and in 
other respiratory diseases. The constant use of par- 
ticular muscles occasions other maladies. In addi- 
tion to these a wide miscellany of sicknesses, such as 
caisson disease, must be attributed to industry. The 
very scope of production under modern conditions has 



142 Industry and Human Welfare 

exposed workers to new perils. In addition to these 
ills, which can be clearly traced, fatigue and strain pre- 
pare the way for many other diseases not inherently 
connected with an occupation.* Fatigue, it has been 
suggested, may be accounted as one of the chief causes 
of disease. f Speaking from this point of view, Sir 
George Newman, the distinguished public health au- 
thority, observes that "whilst at first sight accidents, 
poisoning, and a high occupational death rate are im- 
pressive, it cannot, I think, be doubted that the less 
dramatic side of the problem is the more important — 
namely, the lost time and incapacity due to ill health. 
For this is so widely prevalent as to be almost univer- 
sal, in all districts, at all ages, in all trades. There is a 
vast mass of wasted life and energy due for the most 
part to preventable maladies — in their turn largely at- 
tributable to remediable conditions of industry or to 
the neglect of hygiene." % What Dr. Newman says of 
England probably portrays fairly the conditions in 
this country. A study made by the Bureau of Labor 
Statistics of workmen's sickness and death benefit 
organizations of New York showed that the entire 
membership averaged 6.3 days' sickness. § The 
United States Commission on Industrial Relations said 
in its final report that "each of the thirty-odd mil- 
lion wage earners in the United States loses an aver- 
age of nine days a year through sickness." || The 

* "Fatigue and Efficiency," by Josephine Goldmark. 

t "The Human Machine and Industrial Efficiency," page 79. 

% "The Health of the Industrial Worker," by Collis and Green- 
wood. 

§ Report of the Illinois Health Insurance Commission, 1919, 
page 13. 

|| Final Report, Commission on Industrial Relations, page 202. 



Hazards of Industry 143 

Illinois Health Insurance Commission, whose report 
is one of the best American studies in this field, re- 
marked concerning this estimate that "the data ob- 
tained from our various investigations warrant the 
conclusion that this is only a slight overstatement of 
the average time lost." * 

Disability due to disease which arises out of occu- 
pation is accordingly probably far more common even 
than industrial accidents. Still, it has been found 
extraordinarily difficult to give protection against the 
full range of industrial diseases in workmen's com- 
pensation systems, f Only a few states attempt to 
compensate workers disabled by sickness and these 
have been able to reach only a few individuals. The 
benefits of the law are extended chiefly when the dis- 
ease manifests itself in some sudden bodily derange- 
ment or if it can be traced to a definite time and place, 
or if the employer has neglected to provide safeguards 
which might reasonably have been expected to have 
prevented the injury.J The measures proposed to 
combat the human suffering and the national losses 
due to occupational diseases are general health insur- 
ance, and preventive and protective health activities by 
individual plants and industries, and by the various 
branches of the government. 

It should be possible with the growth of public opin- 
ion to extend compensation insurance systems or else 
to ally them with health insurance so that the human 
wastage of industry may be prevented. To do this 

♦Illinois Health Insurance Report, page 11. 
t "American Labor Legislation Review" by John B. Andrews, 
8: 311. 
t Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin 275, page 53. 



144 Industry and Human Welfare 

effectively, as Dr. Royal Meeker, chief of the scien- 
tific division of the International Labor Office has 
pointed out, workers injured in any way by industry 
must be restored as completely and as quickly as pos- 
sible ; money benefits must be paid so that the worker 
and his family may live during the enforced idleness; 
retraining must be provided those who cannot be re- 
turned to their former tasks ; the opportunity for work 
should be sought through a proper public employment 
system ; and facilities for continuing medical care must 
be accorded the injured worker to the end that recov- 
ery may be attained. When these things are done, 
society, which created the modern industrial system for 
its own comfort and service, will have begun at least to 
atone for the injuries done millions of workers by the 
incidental grind of a machine system of production. 



CHAPTER VIII 



THE STATUS OF WORKERS 



The rise of the factory was coincident with a political 
and social revolution. In attempting to estimate the 
effects of mechanical industry upon the well-being of 
workers, it is accordingly necessary to distinguish be- 
tween these two influences. It is manifestly impos- 
sible to say what might have happened to workers had 
waterpower and the energy of steam never been har- 
nessed to machines, but it is entirely clear that even 
prior to the invention of the basic machines which 
served to create the beginnings of the factory age the 
position of wage workers in society had begun to be 
altered. Political and social tendencies were con- 
spicuous, even though they had not already borne 
their full fruit when the first factories were built. 
These liberating political and social movements fol- 
lowed the logic of their own nature in spite of the 
sometimes conflicting influences generated by the new 
industrial system. The position of workers to-day is 
consequently the resultant of these diverse forces. 

Artizans, mechanics, and laborers were largely unfree 
when the foundations of the first factories were being 
dug. No wage earner, unless he was also a property- 
owner, could vote. South of Mason and Dixon's line 
artizans were slaves or indentured servants. In Penn- 

145 



146 Industry and Human Welfare 

sylvania much work was done by the so-called redemp- 
tioners, the German immigrants who paid for their 
passage overseas by giving four years' labor or more 
to employers who advanced the funds required for emi- 
gration. Industrially the United States was half slave 
and half free at the end of the eighteenth century and 
the first President of the new nation was himself the 
master of an establishment where under the ancient 
handicraft system cloth was fabricated by bonds- 
women.* Artizans of various crafts were offered for 
sale, the black men as slaves and the white as inden- 
tured servants. The unfree worker who quit his ap- 
pointed tasks could be disciplined, and the man who 
ran away might be arrested and returned. The free 
workers of the Northern states were not represented 
politically and, if one may judge by the expressions 
of members of Congress and of delegates to consti- 
tutional conventions where suffrage was being consid- 
ered, they were not highly regarded. The social and 
political status of workers has been revolutionized. 
Universal manhood and womanhood suffrage obtain 
and while in practice casual laborers and negroes are 
often deprived of the vote, race and a wandering life, 
rather than caste or property distinctions, maintain 
the barriers. 

In the North the first manufacturers were often ar- 
tizans who with money loaned by merchants or farm- 
ers were able to begin business in a small way. 
Reporting for Connecticut in 1832, H. L. Ellsworth, 
for example, informed Louis McLane, Secretary of 

*"A Documentary History of American Industrial Society," 
2: 324. 



The Status of Workers 147 

the Treasury, that "many of the manufactories are 
small and carried on by the owner and his family, 
with little additional help. ,, * The figures submitted 
by Mr. Ellsworth substantiated this statement. Estab- 
lishments employing three, four, five and six operatives 
were characteristic. In the north, merchants in the 
larger towns were the chief possessors of wealth. The 
rise of factories created a new and property-holding 
class, who in time were to dispute the supremacy of 
the merchants. The artizans who became the proprie- 
tors and managers of factories were obviously enor- 
mously bettered by the mechanical revolution but it 
is not with the well-being of those who rose to afflu- 
ence that society is now chiefly concerned. 

The fortunes of the men and women who did not 
emerge, and who in the mass have no prospect of 
emerging, are immediately significant. Not only, how- 
ever, do the artizans and laborers of to-day enjoy 
political and social rights which were denied their 
forefathers, but also for them education has become 
general. A hundred years ago workers yearned vainly 
for the dignifying influences of a system of public 
schools. To-day attendance at school is compulsory, 
and certainly in the larger cities the opportunity for 
education is all but universal. The laborer of to-day 
thus not only exercises political privileges which were 
denied his predecessors four generations ago, but also 
through education he has been assisted in utilizing more 
intelligently the political opportunity accorded him. 
In saying this one does not forget the confusions and 

* Executive Documents, 1st Session, 226. Congress, "The Manu- 
factures of the United States," Vol. 1, page 977. 



148 Industry and Human Welfare 

imperfections of the political and educational systems 
which have been created. Each falls far short of the 
desires of generous men and women, but each marks a 
vast advance over what existed at the beginnings of 
the factory age, and each has had a potent influence in 
determining the status of workers. In truth, it may 
be added that, with all their defects, the public schools 
and the democratic political system occasion much of 
the hope of the present. In them lies the inspiration 
and the avenue to release from unredressed evils. 
These gains, however, are mainly attributable to the 
political tendencies which exploded in the American 
and French revolutions. Had there never been a fac- 
tory system, it is possible that manhood, if not woman- 
hood, suffrage would have been established, and even 
popular education might have come. Such a leader as 
Thomas Jefferson was an advocate of these things. 
But how did industry itself affect the position of those 
workers who continued to be laborers and artizans? 

In general it is fair to say that the factory system 
has depressed the economic status of artizans and 
elevated the position of laborers. The experiences of 
the shoemakers or of the iron molders illustrate this. 
The extension of markets and the gradual adoption of 
machinery both tended to degrade the quality of the 
work done by journeymen cobblers. Prices were 
reduced in a competitive market and artizans found 
themselves in an impossible rivalry with factory-made 
goods and with the products of semi-skilled workers 
who were able and willing to live at a lower standard. 
Machinery hastened the process of substituting laborers 



The Status of Workers 149 

for artizans.* This has been accomplished unequally 
and at various times in different industries. As late 
as 1 85 1 all labor on shoemaking was handwork. The 
McKay sole-sewing machine, introduced in 1862, 
however, did in one hour what the journeyman had 
required eighty hours to accomplish. At a stroke 
the skill of the shoemaker for manufacturing purposes 
was rendered obsolete. The spectacular develop- 
ment of the labor organization known as the Knights 
of St. Crispin, following the Civil War, was the protest 
of these craftsmen against the loss of a market for 
their skill, the substitution of laborers for craftsmen, 
and the consequent reduction of wages. The artizan 
able to perform all the operations of his craft has 
tended to disappear in many trades. Shoe factories 
ultimately divided the cobbler's work into many opera- 
tions. Yet the manufacturing system itself created a 
demand for a new kind of skill. Specialized opera- 
tions, such, for instance, as cutting, require an expert- 
ness in a limited field scarcely attained by the general 
workers of the handicraft days. The iron molders are 
an example of belated transfer from a handicraft to 
a machine basis of operation. The long and bitter 
struggle between the Iron Molders' Union and the 
National Founders' Association arose over the question 
of the installation of machinery and the resultant wage 
changes.f 

With a few exceptions, such as printers, artizans 

♦"American Shoemakers, 1648- 1895," by John R. Commons, 
Quarterly Journal of Economics, November, 1909. 

t 'The National Founders' Association," by Margaret Loomis 
Stecker, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 30 : 352. 



150 Industry and Human Welfare 

whose trades have been revolutionized by the invention 
of machines have been unable to maintain their relative 
position in the industrial community. It is indeed a 
curious and significant fact that the craftsmen of to-day 
are very largely men whose trades have not been seri- 
ously affected by the introduction of machinery, and 
that these handicraft workers compose the backbone 
of organized labor. The building trades workers have 
nearly the same skill as that attained by their fore- 
fathers, and the building trades workers are the most 
powerfully unionized. Other groups which have ob- 
tained great power are chiefly those who under machine 
conditions have still been able to acquire skill. The 
railroad brotherhoods are among the most potent labor 
organizations in the country. The strength of the 
railroad unions is to be found in the fact that loco- 
motive engineers and trainmen are possessed of a 
peculiar skill which is not quickly imparted and which 
is not widely distributed. The miners are another 
instance of men securing skill and solidarity under new 
conditions. The clothing makers have completed a 
cycle. Tailors originally ranked in the aristocracy of 
artizanship. The introduction of machine methods 
and the extension of the competitive market made con- 
ditions worse for the workers, who largely lost their 
skill as journeymen to become specialists in particular 
operations. Trade union organization has in their 
case very recently restored much of the dignity and of 
the economic advantage which belonged to journeyman 
tailors. The textile industries, which first felt the 
influence of the factory system, show from the stand- 
point of craftsmanship as well as from that of reward 



The Status of Workers 151 

a striking degradation of labor. The workers in the 
cotton and woolen and silk mills have never been able 
to effect a powerful organization for their own pro- 
tection. New groups of workers have successively 
invaded this field. The skilled workers who first as 
craftsmen and afterwards as machine tenders were dis- 
placed by immigrants and others willing to work for 
lower wages suffered seriously by this change. Yet 
both for the daughters of American farmers who were 
attracted to the early mills and for the peasants of 
Europe who were subsequently drawn into the textile 
factories, the shift in the basis of the industry from a 
hand to power-machine process meant an advance. 
Again and again this contrast is found. Journeyman 
artizans were injured by machinery, while laborers were 
lifted to a higher level of living when they were drawn 
into new work. The reluctance of skilled workers to 
submit to changes which implied the sacrifice of the 
cunning of their hands as well as losses in income has 
been one of the tragic phases of the industrial revolu- 
tion. It has been a struggle in the main to preserve 
status, and it has been a losing struggle. Old values 
were ruthlessly destroyed and those who suffered saw 
for themselves too often no compensation. 

Men and women became machine tenders. Imper- 
sonal motors determined the speed of human effort. 
The leisurely quality of handwork was lost. Special- 
ization at endlessly repetitive tasks performed at a high 
speed injected a new factor into the toil of men and 
women. Repetition of a single process eliminated the 
joy of the worker who has a sense in creation in his 
work. For most machine tenders the craftsman's 



152 Industry and Human Welfare 

pleasure of performance does not exist. Some trade 
union leaders and some manufacturers, however, now 
regard the matter without misgivings. They assert 
that repetitious work can never be rendered truly inter- 
esting. Happiness, accordingly, must be found outside 
of work. Consequently, they contend that hours should 
be shortened so that leisure may exist, and wages 
should be raised so that leisure may be enjoyed. That 
idea is in itself a child of the machine age. So far as 
men can now see there is in truth no prospect of a 
change from repetitious labor. The most productive 
factories are those in which standardization is furthest 
advanced. Such was the experience of the World War, 
during which much progress was made toward placing 
industry more completely on a foundation of machinery. 
With mechanical processes the United States can now 
produce more than it can consume, as was shown during 
1 91 8, but with a return to manual production it would 
be impossible to provide for the necessities of the popu- 
lation. It is improbable that the kind of pleasure in 
work of which William Morris was the prophet can 
ever be restored in factories where men and women 
spend their days and nights in the continual repetition 
of a single set of operations. The normal human mind 
is wearied by monotony. Hence it is true that relief 
and recreation, as well as rest, must be had beyond the 
working hours. 

From this standpoint it can hardly be argued that 
the factory system has brought joy or dignity to 
workers. The hours of labor were longer before 
machinery imitated the deftness of human hands, and 
many tasks had almost infinitely to be repeated from 



The Status of Workers 153 

the days when galley slaves propelled the vessels of 
their conquerors. But the impersonal beat of ma- 
chinery has made demands, never before approximated, 
upon the men and women who serve it. In the textile 
industry, for example, the rate of production is deter- 
mined by the speed of machines. It is impossible for 
the workers tending the separate operations to influence 
the rate.* Human beings are subordinated not im- 
mediately to the will of other men — although, of course, 
some human will decides the rate at which the engines 
move — but to the motion of machinery. That this has 
deleterious effects on the body as well as upon the 
spirit of man seems probable from the researches of 
Philip Sargent Florence and others for the United 
States Public Health Service.f The rhythm of such 
machines as lathes in certain operations appears, fur- 
thermore, to drive workers onward regardless of the 
accumulating poisons of fatigue, and regardless even 
of their ability in some such cases to alter the speed 
of the machine. 

Not less influential than power machinery itself in 
affecting the status of workers has been the corporate 
form of organization which industry, trade and trans- 
portation have taken. In 1830, when the factory system 
was well established, industry seems principally to 
have been in the hands of individual owners whose 
establishments were small. Certain Lynn shoe manu- 
facturers reported in 183 2 J that their real estate and 
buildings varied in value from $200 to $2,000. Fac- 

* National Industrial Conference Board Report on Working 
Week of 48 Hours or Less. 
fU. S. Public Health Service, Bulletin 106. 
t "The Manufactures of the United States," Vol. 1 : 232. 



154 Industry and Human Welfare 

tories with only two or three employees were common. 
An establishment with a hundred workers was large. 
In such circumstances the relationship between the 
manufacturer and his employees was similar to that 
which subsisted between the old master workman and 
his journeymen. The enactment of legislation designed 
to facilitate the growth of corporations tended to de- 
stroy this relationship. The corporation, and later the 
trust, created a new industrial environment, which 
influenced powerfully the position of workers. In the 
report to Secretary McLane in 1832, the accounts of 
ninety Pennsylvania iron manufactories are listed. 
Altogether they represented an investment of $3,- 
200,000. The United States Steel Corporation alone 
was valued at $2,430,546,962.56 on December 31, 
1920.* S. Smith & Company's rolling mill and nail 
factory at Pittsburgh employed twenty-five men and 
six boys in 1832. The United States Steel Corpora- 
tion had 267,345 on its rolls in 1920. The rolling mill 
of 1832 was managed by the owner. There were more 
than a hundred thousand stockholders of the United 
States Steel Corporation during 1921. Most owners 
can have little share in management. 

In 19 14 nearly a third of all wage earners engaged 
in manufactures worked in establishments employing 
500 or more persons. Only about 13 per cent of the 
wage earners were employed in factories using twenty 
workers or fewer, according to the 1914 census of 
manufactures. The number of these small factories 
is large, composing as it did in 19 14 upwards of 70 

* Nineteenth Annual Report, United States Steel Corporation, 
Report to Stockholders, 1920. 



The Status of Workers 155 

per cent of the entire number of industrial establish- 
ments in the country, but the proportion of workers 
employed is very small. On the other hand, enormous 
organizations are common. Corporations employing 
as many as 10,000 workers excite little comment, while 
the more conspicuous concerns utilize the energies of 
thirty, forty, fifty, and even a hundred thousand men 
and women. 

Great power over the lives and fortunes of the men 
and women employed is possessed by the directors 
of such enterprises. Many large corporations have 
created cities, in which their factories are situated and 
their workers are housed. Often the corporation owns 
the entire community.* In many of the "satellite' ' 
towns, workers employed by the dominant industry 
occupy houses owned by their employers, buy food and 
clothes and other necessities of life at stores owned by 
the employers, send their children to schools maintained 
by the employers, worship in churches established by 
their employers, and finally are buried in cemeteries 
located upon their employers' land. Many of the com- 
munities in which employers have provided the essential 
utilities of living, it must be admitted, are on the whole 
far more comfortable and decent than the localities 
which have been neglected. But while one is scrupu- 
lous in refraining from suggesting censure of those 
who have come into this great industrial power, it is 
impossible to refuse to observe the fact. The relation- 
ship between such companies as the United States Steel 
Corporation, the General Electric Company, the United 

♦Testimony before United States Commission on Industrial 
Relations, dealing with Lead, S. D. 



156 Industry and Human Welfare 

States Rubber Company, the Ford Motor Company, the 
International Harvester Company, American Woolen 
Company, to cite only a few, and their employees, is 
a new social phenomenon. In theory the humblest 
citizen worker enjoys all the political and social rights 
of the richest and most potent industrial magnate. But 
the economic status of the employee of a large cor- 
poration is not, save in the industries where trade 
unionism has reached maturity, one of independence. 
A new stratification, without albeit the loyalties of 
the older feudal system, has been created by the factory 
system. A few men, often one man, can exercise a 
determining influence on the lives of tens of thousands 
of his fellow citizens.* In the case of the United States 
Steel Corporation a small group of men having mem- 
bership on the board of directors were able, during 
August, 1 919, to compel 66,711 men to work twelve 
hours a day and to conform their entire existence to 
that obtrusive fact. A few directors and their local 
representatives in the management can, through their 
political affiliations, deny to their employees the con- 
stitutional rights of free speech and free assemblage.! 
That is not an unparalleled development in history, but 
it throws light on the changes in the position of workers 
accomplished by the rise of the factory system. The 
political revolution which tended to liberate the en- 
thralled workers of the eighteenth century has been in 
part checkmated by the industrial revolution whose 
unconscious drift has been toward servility instead of 
freedom. 



* The Survey, March 5, 1921, page 8x1. 
t Idem, November 8, 1919. 



The Status of Workers 157 

In part this has been the inevitable consequence of 
the system of incorporation with limited liability. 
Nearly three-quarters of the industrial workers of the 
country are employed in establishments owned by 
corporations. Only about five per cent work in fac- 
tories owned by individuals.* It is difficult for any 
except the largest stockholders to exert any influence 
upon the policies of the companies in which their money 
is invested. The ownership of many of the most 
important corporations is widely distributed. The 
American Telephone and Telegraph Company, for ex- 
ample, reported over 150,000 stockholders in 1921. 
Corporations are often managed by officers who are 
responsible to distant owners. Absentee ownership 
has, so far as industrial conditions are concerned, 
resulted in irresponsible ownership. Some of the most 
serious industrial controversies of recent years are the 
consequences of this system.f Discussing the copper 
strikes which were prevalent in Arizona during the 
summer of 191 7, the President's Mediation Commis- 
sion observed that "distant ownership, wholly apart 
from its tendency to divorce income from the respon- 
sibility for the conditions under which it is acquired, 
creates barriers against the opportunity of understand- 
ing the labor aspects, the human problems of industry, 
and solidarity of interest among the various owners 
checks the views of any one liberal owner from pre- 
vailing against the autocratic policy of the majority." 

The Arizona copper mines presented during the war 

* Abstract of the Census of Manufactures, 1914, page 374« 

t Report of the President's Mediation Commission and of the 

Congressional Investigation into the Colorado Coal Strike of 

1913-1914. 



158 Industry and Human Welfare 

an aggravated case, but it is widely true that the irre- 
sponsibility of owners under a system of corporate 
production has menaced greatly the welfare of the 
workers employed. Men and women are employed by 
overshadowing corporations whose widely scattered 
owners lack influence, and too often interest, in the 
conditions of work and of life created. Nothing has 
happened in recent years to justify any belief that 
industry would be operated in smaller units and that 
ownership would become identical with management. 
The tendency for the immediate future seems fixed in 
the opposite direction. So far as the material condi- 
tions of work are concerned, the escape lies through 
governmental regulation, as already partially developed 
in safety codes, and to an extent through trade union 
agreements. The liberty of the individual worker 
employed in such enterprises cannot be secured except 
through the agency of unions. The benevolence of 
the good employer may provide better material con- 
ditions than any union could exact or any government 
compel, but in the face of the overshadowing size of 
modern corporations nothing except a banding together 
of workers into associations competent by their num- 
bers and the intelligence of their leadership to meet 
their employers upon equal grounds can nourish that 
freedom and independence characteristic of farmers 
who are secure in the possession of their own lands. 
Economic security is the prerequisite to political lib- 
erty, and unionization is the only apparent refuge of 
the workers who are unwilling to trust their fortunes 
to others. 

This conclusion arises from the verjf nature of 



The Status of Workers 159 

modern large scale industry. Light was thrown on the 
matter by the remark of Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 
at the first industrial conference called by former 
President Wilson. The younger Rockefeller said: 
"Surely it is not consistent for us as Americans to 
demand democracy in government and to practice 
autocracy in industry." The statement is true, but 
it is also true that present industrial organization is an 
offshoot of the family system rather than of govern- 
mental forms. The early factories, it has been noted, 
were family affairs. A master workman, assisted by 
his family and a few outsiders, comprised the entire 
personnel of the organization. To Mary Wollstone- 
craft, the pioneer of feminism and of suffrage, the 
husband and father was in the home the spiritual 
equivalent of the tyrannical king in the nation. Women 
and children had few legal rights which the male head 
of the household need respect. That family life was 
not on the whole unpleasant when Queen Victoria was 
a child is, incidentally, perhaps to be explained by the 
fact that human customs are often more amiable than 
laws. The almost absolute power which the father 
and husband possessed in the household at the end of 
the eighteenth century has been the model upon which 
American industry was unconsciously organized. In- 
stead of having a few workers, a somewhat enlarged 
family, the modern manager, who is the heir of the 
master workman, may, in such an extreme case as that 
of the United States Steel Corporation, control the 
lives of well on to a million people. While it is true 
that workers, even in the largest establishments, are 
employed upon a contract rather than upon the status 



160 Industry and Human Welfare 

basis, it is also not to be denied that in its power to 
impose conditions such a corporation exerts the same 
kind of authority exercised in other generations by the 
male head of the house. 

Yet it may be conceded that at its worst this over- 
weening power which the modern employer has obtained 
as a joint product of the old family system and the new 
integration of industry is not more difficult to endure 
than was the petty tyranny of many a master mechanic 
in the old days. The occasional memoirs of appren- 
tices both in this country and in Europe, whence the be- 
ginnings of our civilization were borrowed, betray no 
trailing clouds of affection for the old order. Rous- 
seau assuredly was as keenly irritated by his master as 
any modern workman is likely now to be by an incon- 
siderate foreman. Nevertheless, an industrial system 
which results in organizations employing as many as a 
quarter of a million workers manifestly cannot operate 
on the plan of an eighteenth century family. Good 
employers are, of course, preferable to bad ones, but 
whether the head of a great organization is good or 
bad, workers need the protection which only the pos- 
session of recognized rights assures. Industry is thus 
a battlefield on which the ideas embodied in the older 
family system are contesting for supremacy with that 
other group of principles which are incorporated in the 
American theory of self-government. The logic of the 
family has ruled industry to a large extent, but in- 
creasingly the logic of politics is demanding recognition. 
If self-government is right on the political field, self- 
government is right in industry, for the same arguments 
arise in each case. Self-government, the logic of poli- 



The Status of Workers 161 

tics, means among other things the recognition of trade 
unionism. 

Society has been reluctant to concede the right of 
industrial self-government because of the double social 
standard. In an enlightening bit of testimony before 
the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, 
John H. Walker, then president of the Illinois State 
Federation of Labor, set forth the situation from the 
standpoint of the trade unionist. Mr. Walker said that 
the double economic standard was the fundamental 
cause of industrial unrest. Asked what he meant he 
replied : 

"A workman is not supposed to ask anything more than 
a fair day's wage for a fair day's work: he is supposed 
to work until he is fairly tuckered out — say eight hours — 
and when he does a fair day's work he is not supposed 
to ask for any more wages than enough to support his 
family, while with the business man the amount of labor 
furnishes no criterion for the amount they receive. 
People accept it as all right if they do not do any work 
at all, and accept it as all right if they get as much 
money as they can. In fact, they are given credit for 
getting the greatest amount of money for the least 
amount of work. . . . The average worker feels that he 
is a nonentity, a tool to be used by those who own 
industries." 

The condition to which the union leader pointed is so 
much a matter of custom that few are ever aware of 
the diversity of standard. The working man is still 
to many a thing to be used. That he should aspire to 
the sort of life enjoyed by the more fortunate seems 
astounding to some. The dignity of labor is a common- 
place, and yet when, the other day, a street cleaner in 
his white uniform entered a large hotel in New York, 
he was arrested for disorderly conduct. It mattered 



1 62 Industry and Human Welfare 

not that his mission was a perfectly proper and lawful 
one — that of obtaining a theater ticket. His clothes 
were against him. The man was taken to a police 
station, and, strangest of all, not a single newspaper 
which recounted the episode appeared to find anything 
extraordinary in it. Apparently it is so much a matter 
of custom that men in working clothes must not obtrude 
themselves upon the attention of the residents of a 
metropolitan hotel — much less entertain the same de- 
sires — that no commentator saw in the event anything 
worthy of remark. 

The double standard is a relic of the old inequality. 
As long as some men had a servile status, others more 
privileged were able successfully to assert that dual 
principles must be applied. Servile workers were not 
measured by the same tests which more fortunate folk 
applied to themselves. That idea of inequality, of a 
duality of standards, has lingered. As much as any- 
thing else it retards the acceptance of the logic of 
politics by industry. 

Trade union organization is itself, however, a meas- 
ure of the present position of workers. In the strictly 
manufacturing branches labor organization is relatively 
not powerful, although the garment-making industry 
is thoroughly unionized. The railroads, which are both 
a product and a cause of the industrial revolution, are 
almost completely unionized. This also is true of the 
coal mines, which bear a similar basic relationship to 
industry in general. On the other hand, in such a 
fundamental industry as iron and steel, unionism hardly 
exists. The automobile industry, likewise, is singu- 
larly free of unionization. In general, it is accurate 



The Status of Workers 163 

to say that between four and five million American 
workers are enrolled in trade unions,* and that these 
workers, although only a minority of the total industrial 
population, are so distributed that they are able to 
exert great influence upon industry. In most trades 
the state of the labor market is the measure of the 
power of unions. If labor is scarce, the unions are 
able to exercise considerable power ; on the other hand, 
when workers are abundant the unions are scarcely able 
to retain the advantages they gained during the fat 
years. So far, no industrial code to temper this 
struggle has been developed. The nearest approach to 
a code was the statement of principles adopted by the 
employers and the trade union leaders who formed 
the National War Labor Board. This was a war-time 
expression and patriotism moved the leaders to more 
generous action than has ever been recorded during 
peace. The President's Industrial Conference of 
March, 1920, attempted less formally to crystallize 
current ideas concerning industrial justice. Congress 
in the Esch-Cummins Transportation Law also ap- 
proached the subject. 

As to the growing or disappearing cleavage of the 
classes it is difficult to form a balanced conclusion. 
The old barriers separating the classes have been 
broken down, but new barriers have been erected. 
Alexander Hamilton would feel at home in the New 
York of to-day. He would observe social contrasts not 
less marked than those with which he was familiar. 
The theory of the rights of workers and of employers 
has radically changed, but the distance between the 

* Annual Report of the American Federation of Labor, 1921. 



164 Industry and Human Welfare 

humblest tenement dweller and the family living on a 
hundred thousand dollars a year is still sufficiently 
great to satisfy the aristocratic tastes of many of the 
founders of the American republic. The ideas con- 
cerning the separation of the classes have changed, but 
the distances are not less marked. Industry has created 
great wealth. The total value of the products of 
American manufacturing establishments in 191 9 was 
upwards of sixty-two billion dollars.* The number of 
industrial establishments had not comparably increased. 
For all industries, 288,376 were counted in 1919. In 
1850, 123,025 establishments were recorded, with a 
total output estimated to be worth slightly over a 
billion dollars. The products of manufacturing estab- 
lishments increased in value sixty-two- fold during those 
years, while the number of establishments was hardly 
more than doubled. That change — the enormous in- 
crease in absolute wealth, and comparatively slight 
increase in the numbers of establishments — gives an 
index of the change in status which the workers have 
experienced as a result of the industrial revolution. 

That very fact, however, has produced a far-reaching 
result. Because of the vastness of the size of industrial 
organizations the individual worker is dwarfed into 
insignificance, but so many workers have become con- 
scious of personal impotence that great mass movements 
have come into existence. Workers have a solidarity 
now which is unprecedented in the history of Western 
civilization. Trade unionism, socialism, and a score 
of variant doctrines have welded together millions. 
Unity, even for the vaguely denned purposes which 

* Census of Manufactures, Press Release, May 24, 1921. 



The Status of Workers 165 

are the ends of trade unionism, has made an enormous 
difference in the position of workers. Industrially, the 
individual artizan counts for less than did his great- 
grandfather in a New England village, but in the mass 
artizans count for more than ever before. The con- 
sciousness of power, even of dormant power, is an 
emboldening and dignifying influence. Success in the 
World War admittedly was within the reach of that 
group of nations whose working people were most 
determined upon victory. Every statesman realized 
that and in the end the workers understood it. The 
crisis crystallized what had before been dimly perceived 
and at the same time it bred a new spirit. The worker 
of to-day knows that he has obtained insecurity in 
exchange for the comparative assurance which belonged 
to his forebears. He knows that when he is employed, 
however, he lives more comfortably than did his 
ancestors, and he is convinced that security is also 
within his reach. Labor is no longer docile. Political 
recognition has been gained, but it seems to be an 
imperfect tool, since final power appears to rest in the 
economic rather than in the political realm. For that 
reason unrest does not abate with the passage of years. 
Workers in the United States have not clearly defined 
a program of action for use during a long period, but 
they cherish a fundamental purpose. Through union 
on the industrial and political fields they evince a deter- 
mination to win for themselves, their women and their 
children, a share in the better life which the mechanical 
revolution has brought within view. Few who con- 
template the present fruits of the factory system will 
challenge the faith that it is possible to lift high the 



1 66 Industry and Human Welfare 

level of living of those who now with such inadequate 
rewards bear the heavier burdens of production. The 
people who, by the use of sovereign power, created a 
new industry, can, by that same sovereignty, distribute 
more equitably the wealth obtained. How that is to 
be accomplished is not entirely clear. Counter cur- 
rents still surge and add confusion to an era of tran- 
sition, but of the general movement there is no uncer- 
tainty. Factories were built to increase human wel- 
fare, and it lies within the hollow of the hand of this 
nation to fulfill that historic desire. 



THE END 



INDEX 



Agricultural labor, 67 
Aldrich Committee, 84 
American Emigrant So- 
ciety, 126 
American Federation of 

Labor, 99, 104 
American Red Cross, 138 
Annals of Congress, 16 
Annual earnings, 88 
Apprentice, 39, 47 
Artizan, 16 
Assumption of risk, 136 

Beveridge, William H., 116 
Brandeis, Louis D., 103 
Bureau of Labor Statistics, 

89, 107, 118 
Bushnell, Horace, 83 
Business Cycle, 118 

Carey, Mathew, 34, 70 
Childbirth, 69 
Child labor, 4, 44, 55, 59 
Children's Bureau, 74 
Clothing, artizan's, 78 
Compensation legislation, 

137 
Continuous industry, 140 



Contributory negligence, 

136 
Corporations, 154 
Cost of living, 92 
Coxe, Tench, 41, 48, 81, 

US 

Dangerous trades, 68 
Debtors, 136 
Doffer girls, 21 
Domestic service, 6j 
Du Pont, E. L, 109 
Dust hazard, 69 

Education, 52, 96 
Eight-hour day, 55, 65, 99, 

106 
Enforcement, 54 
Esch-Cummins Law, 163 

Factory laws, 66 
Family Manufactures, 61 
Family System, 159 
Fatigue, 69, 100, 142 
Fitch, John A., 109 
Forty-four hour week, 

107 
Freedom of Contract, 103 



167 



1 68 



Index 



Gallatin, Albert, 41 
Goldmark, Josephine, 104 
Governmental Interference, 

Hamilton, Alexander, 1, 28, 

31,37 
Hart, Hornell, 117 
Hazard, Thomas B., 17 
Health, 64 

Health Insurance, 143 
Hoffman, Frederick L., 138 
Home manufactures, 78 
Homespun, 83 
Hours of labor, 20, 64 

Immigration, 33, 36, 125 
Immigration Report, 87 
Incorporation laws, 27 
Indentured servants, 12 
Index number, 85 
Industrial accidents, 134, 

138 

Industrial Commission of 
Ohio, 89 

Industrial disease, 141 

Infant mortality, 74 

International Labor Con- 
ference, 132 

Knights of St. Crispin, 149 

Labor turnover, 124 
Labor union, 98, 158 
Laissez faireism, 25, 63 



Land laws, 35 
Lauck, W. Jett, By 
Limited liability, 157 
Living wage, y2, 92 

Mann, Horace, 56 
Manufactory House, 19 
Married women, 73 
Mechanics, 17, 28 
Meeker, Royal, 144 
Migratory workers, 123 
Minimum wage, 72 
Molineux, William, 19 

National Industrial Confer- 
ence Board, 90, 92, 105 

National War Labor Board, 
163 

Night Work, 66, 6y, 109 

Oregon Ten-hour law, 103 
Output, 105 

Pay of soldiers, 16 

Phossy jaw, 68 

Pioneer cabins, 79 

Play, 58 

Police power, 103 

President's Conference on 
Unemployment, 130 

President's Industrial Con- 
ference, 66, 106 

President's Mediation Com- 
mission, 157 



Index 



169 



Prohibition of employment, 

68 
Property holders, 8 
Protection, 2, 31 
Public schools, 147 

Railroad Labor Board, 92 
Real wages, 85 
Redemptioners, 12, 78 
Regulation of commerce, 

30 
Reservoir of labor, 125 
Rhythms, 101 
Robinson, Mrs. Harriet H., 

39 
Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 

159 
Rural children, j6 

Safety, 64, 134 
School law, 52 
Seasonal demand, 121 
Self-government, 160 
Servility, 156 
Seven-day week, 109 
Shoemaking, 149 
Slater, Samuel, 7, 20 
Social control, 134 
Stabilizing production, 130 
Standard of living, jy 
Status of workers, 148 
Strain, 142 
Strike, 53, 64 



Suffrage, 8, 34, 99 
Sunday laws, 112 
Sunday work, no 
Sweat shops, 70 
Sydenstricker, Edgar, 87 

Tariff, 24, 29, 33 
Ten-hour day, 65, 66 
Textile factories, 71 
Tuberculosis, 69 
Twelve-hour day, 109 

Underfeeding, 75 

Unemployment, 83, 114 

Unemployment insurance, 
114 

United States Commission 
on Industrial Relations, 
161 

United States Employment 
Service, 128 

United States Steel Cor- 
poration, 109 

United States Supreme 
Court, 103 

Wages, 19, 33, 71, 80 
Walker, John H., 161 
War Industries Board, 89 
Wealth, 44 
Working mothers, 74 
Workmen's compensation, 
141 



